ABSTRACT
In psychiatry, as in many other branches of medicine, the twentieth century was extraordinarily eventful. Radically new theories of the life of the mind emerged; Freudian psychoanalysis was conceived and spread culturally; a huge, diversified mental health profession came into existence; psychiatric terms and concepts penetrated everyday life; drugs for alleviating the psychotic suffering of hundreds of thousands of people were engineered; and there was an explosion of knowledge about the chemistry and physiology of the brain — an explosion powerful enough to be compared by some observers to the Darwinian and Newtonian revolutions.
