I have in mind a fellow who is a high-grade defective, who has passed through a praecox attack, who has come back to comparative normality. He is a reasonably useful citizen around the institution but he can’t get on outside the institution and he has periods of not getting on well in the institution, because every once in a while he will go out and get drunk. Now what are you going to do with that sort of fellow? Such an individual does not always stand discipline very well. A doctor came to me and talked to me about him the other day and wanted to know what should we do with this fellow. I said, “Shut him up; take his privileges away from him and watch him very carefully, because I don’t believe he will stand shutting up very well. When you have made the maximum impression upon him from that discipline, let him cut.” You have constantly to shift between severity and almost lack of discipline with these people to keep them at their level, and you have to realize all the time it is a matter of very fine adjustment and that after all you can very easily do them a great deal of harm. Therefore I am always more or less disturbed by the constant effort that is being made in bodies like this to standardize all kinds of rules and regulations, because I realize that in this class of cases particularly there are individual problems and they must be left for the individual judgment of the physician who has charge of them. I have, for example, a clerk in the office, a man who is probably sixty odd years of age. When he is sober he is as efficient a clerk as we have in our office, but he persistently gets drunk and stays drunk for days at a time. Now the easiest thing on earth is to discharge that man. What is going to become of him? He can’t take care of himself. He has a family dependent upon him. That would mean to pauperize him and make him a public charge. I developed some time ago a method of dealing with him. I penalized him every time he got drunk by taking away a certain amount of his pay. It was hard punishment. He does not get much pay. The result was I pushed him to the limit, because it cost him too much to drink. The result was he had longer periods of sobriety than he ever had before, but he did break down once in a while, and when he did we had to forgive him. Now we have to deal with that sort of problem among our employees and patients, and we are put to it constantly to devise out of our ingenuity how best to meet it; and one of the agencies at our command is the disciplinary measure, which, if wisely enforced, can be used to push the patient to the highest possibility of his adjustment.