Abstract

LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN M. D. 1 1 V. A. Hospital, West Haven, Conn. Dr. Board's objectives can only tend toward a happier society. His failure to distinguish between suggestion and analysis prejudices his worthwhile objectives in the following ways: 1. It leaves him unarmed against the resistences of society which go unrecognized. 2. It compromises the effect of the psychiatrist's most potent weapons,—expert advice and education, by concealing them in a tendentious special plea for the values of the psychiatrist. 3. In the manner of so many current political positions, it blurs the meaning of society's conflicting values by insisting that they are perfectly realized in the tissue of compromises and violations that alone can give them expression. 4. Finally, one suspects that there will come a time when the psychiatrist, accustomed to the stationary ethical foundation he has artfully built and unprepared for the heaving sea of felt principles, will feel in himself the upsurge of the rejected "contaminant" and be overcome by a moral malaise without remedy.