ABSTRACT
A CONVENTIONAL opening to psychiatrical monographs is a tedious discussion of the literature pertinent to the field in which explorations are to be described. The reader will be spared this for the following reasons. It is expected that he will be a technical psychiatrist, a professional psychologist, or a layman interested in psychological problems. In the first case he will have ready access to, or be already familiar with, digests laboriously compiled by experts, whose pens turn with greater facility to such tasks than does mine. If, however, he be either an “academic” or a lay psychologist, his interest will be confined to the text with its clinical material and argument; he will be indifferent to the question of the relative or absolute originality of what he reads. Nevertheless, since psychiatrical and psychological discussions cannot be utterly divorced, since the classificatory and diagnostic problems with which we are to be concerned have important psychological implications—and would otherwise be out of place in this book—for these reasons the non-medical reader must be put au courant with some matters of psychiatrical debate. It is mainly for him that this chapter is written.
