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The Proper Study of Mankind

The Presidential Address at the One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association held in London, July 1967

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

H. V. Dicks
H. V. Dicks*
Affiliation:
The Tavistock Clinic, London
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Extract

The signal honour and distinction you have conferred upon me has set me wondering how and why I have merited your selection at this time. It is true that I have worked and spoken for having our own College. I have always profoundly believed in the reality of psychiatry's claim to be the other half and an equal partner of internal medicine, to speak from the position of its own self-respecting identity. It next occurred to me that this sense of identity and personal autonomy is consolidated around the phase of development we call “coming of age”. The hitherto sharp and often painful internal conflicts of adolescence now merge into a greater sense of integration. That means a tolerance of doubt, of ambivalence and of inner contradictions which strengthen where earlier they seemed to threaten stability. So, I reflected, as our rather young discipline has matured to the point of achieving its sense of assured identity—in the space of months or a few years—this Association could accept and wanted to recognize a representative of its own hitherto underprivileged “other half”—the frankly and explicitly “subjectivist” psychotherapeutic or “dynamic” viewpoint.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 113 , Issue 505 , December 1967 , pp. 1333 - 1344
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1967 

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