at this
centenary celebration of the renowned Bloomingdale Hospital, my
immediate impulse was to choose as my topic a phase of psychiatric
development to which this Hospital has especially contributed through
our greatly missed August Hoch and his deeply appreciated coworker
Amsden. I have in mind the great gain in concreteness of the physician's
work with mind and the resulting contribution of psychiatry to a better
knowledge of human life and its problems. The great gain this passing
century is able to hand on to its successor is the clearer recognition
of just what the psychiatrist actually works with and works on.

Of all the divisions of medicine, psychiatry has suffered longest from
man's groping for a conception of his own nature. Psychiatry means,
literally, the healing of souls. What then do we actually mean by soul
or by psyche? This question has too long been treated as a disturbing
puzzle.

To-day we feel that modern psychiatry has found itself--through the
discovery that, after all, the uncritical common-sense view of mind and
soul is not so far remote from a critical common-sense view of the
individual and its life activity, freed from the forbidding and
confusing assumptions through which the concept of mind and soul has
been held in bewildering awe.

Strange to say, good old Aristotle was nearer an understanding than most
of the wise men and women that have succeeded him for these more than
two thousand years. He saw in the psyche what he called the form and
realization or fulfilment of the human organism; he would probably now
say with us, the activity and function as an individual or person.

Through the disharmonies and inevitable disruption of a
self-disorganizing civilization, the Greek and Roman world was plunged
into the dark centuries during which the perils of the soul and the
sacrificial attainment of salvation by monastic life and crusades
threatened to overshadow all other concern. This had some inevitable
results: it favored all those views through which the soul became like a
special thing or substance, in contrast to and yet a counterpart of the
physical body. As long as there was no objective experimental science,
the culminating solution of life problems had to be intrusted to that
remarkable development of religious philosophy which arose from the
blending of Hebrew religion and tradition and the loftiest products of
the Greek mind, in the form which St. Paul and the early Church f