The fact that psychiatry lags in development and recognition behind other branches of medicine is due in part to the crudity of its clinical methods. The evolution of interest in science is from simple, obvious and tangible problems to more intricate and impalpable researches. Refined laboratory work has been done in psychiatric clinics, particularly along histopathological lines, but clinical studies follow antiquated methods. The internist does not say, “The patient has sugar in his urine, therefore he has diabetes and therefore he will die.” He finds a glycosuria and looks for its cause. If this symptom is found to be related to others in such a way as to justify the diagnosis of diabetes, a therapeutic problem arises, that of adjusting the chemistry of the body. The prognosis depends not on the disease but the interreaction of the organism and the morbid process. Both in diagnosis and treatment an individual factor, the patient’s metabolism, is of prime importance. Now in psychiatry, although the personality is diseased, this personal factor has been almost entirely neglected. Text-books furnish us with composite pictures which are called diseases, not with descriptions of reactions brought about by the interplay of personal and environmental factors. Educated people are not satisfied with novels that fail to depict real characters. Clinical psychiatry, however, has been content with the dime-novel type of character delineation. This is all the more disappointing, inasmuch as the study of insanity should contribute largely to our knowledge of everyday life. This defect can only be remedied by looking on every case as a problem in which the origin of each symptom is to be studied and its relation traced to all other symptoms and to the personality as a whole. This is an ambitious task and we do not pretend to any great achievement, merely to a beginning.