ABSTRACT
The psychiatry of today is in a rather similar position, because the people are still so very ignorant of the mind. But the best of its practitioners are people of great skill and understanding and apparently inexhaustible patience; people whose humanity reveals itself just as much in the way they recognize their limitations as in their satisfaction when a patient gets better in their care. It is, nevertheless, very understandable that psychiatrists should approach their patients with two rather different kinds of etiological purpose and interest in mind. The property that gives psychoanalysis the character of a mythology is its combination of conceptual barrenness with an enormous facility in explanation. The lack of good evidence of the specific therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis is one of the reasons why it has not been received into the general body of medical practice. There is some truth in psychoanalysis too, as there was in Mesmerism and in phenology.
