ABSTRACT
Babies and infants are dependent on mother and close family for care and supervision, but this is a transitional state. Maturation and practice bring the abilities to sit, crawl, walk, talk and think. The concept of dementia is well established in psychiatric thinking since the descriptive writings on old age by the ancients have given way to the systematic clinical analyses of the German alienists of the nineteenth century. The dementias are also common among the elderly presented to psychiatrists. Dementia is in itself a term that has frightened or depressed people so much that there has evolved a range of alternatives for professional or lay usage. The husband and wife system is seen to have many ingredients of success; the trick for other caring agencies to develop in relationship to it is that of providing help without invading its self-sufficiency. A life-long loner may have well developed coping abilities that survive even into a dementia.
