ABSTRACT
Formal relations between psychology and psychiatry go back. On November 2, 1944, the then Council of Directors of the American Psychological Association voted to create a Committee on Clinical Psychology "with the general purpose of clarifying the relationship between Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology and studying related problems". The committee's name has been changed twice, to the Committee on the Relation of Psychology to Psychiatry in 1947 and to the Committee on Relations with the American Psychiatric Association in 1958. In May 1962, the American Psychiatric Association adopted as policy the report of the AMA mentioned earlier, and in 1964 they issued a position statement incorporating the AMA recommendations, Principles underlying Interdisciplinary Relations between the Professions of Psychiatry and Psychology. Many psychologists were critical of this position statement, feeling that there was too much emphasis on medical direction, the language couched too often in leader-helper terms, with psychologists in the role of helper.
