It is due to the growing emphasis upon the importance of understanding the personality as a functioning whole that modern medical men are willing and anxious to assemble data about the behavior of the individual in his family, business, and recreational relations. Such facts are often useful to the physician in making his diagnosis and in deciding how to handle the patient. The modern emphasis upon the rôle of reverie in developing one’s traits and interests has led to the inclusion of data about night dreams, daydreams, ambitions, grievances, enthusiasms, and loyalties of the subject. Not infrequently the productions of the patient are recorded in his own words by a stenographer who is present during certain interviews with physicians. All these psychological and sociological data increase the significance of the case record for the individual who studies it for the purpose of understanding the total developmental history of the person. Sometimes the case histories concern people who are without mental disorder, but who have, for one reason or another, been committed for observation. The German government was not the only one in the late war which sometimes resorted to the expedient of avoiding the appearance of internal dissension by referring pacifists to a mental hospital. The records of the kind obtained under these circumstances are often of men and women without pathology, and serve to control the conclusions which rest on the study of pathological cases. Quite often the specifically pathological features in the record of a sick person are very meager. Thus, one prominent politician, the mayor of a large city, was brought to a mental hospital suffering from an alcoholic psychosis,[2] delirium tremens. He was only “insane” (to use a nonscientific term) when he was passing through this acute alcoholic episode, and was soon released. But the record of what he said and did during the delirium casts a brighter light on the deeper motivations of his political career than many pages of conventional biography. The hallucinations and delusions which he experienced were not entirely stereotyped for the disease. Since he was no longer able to maintain his repressions, his inner fantasy life came out in the clear, and his personality structure stood revealed. Another politician showed nothing abnormal except a propensity for collecting women’s shoe heels, which he found sexually stimulating. He came to the medical psychologist to be freed from his fetishist perversion, and in so doing he made possible the preparation of a document which intimately revealed the origin of certain political interests. From the point of view of the political scientist the most valuable parts of his history happened to be quite far removed from the narrowly circumscribed pathological symptoms.