development; but we have learned to see more clearly why the one person
does and the other does not suffer. Evidently, not everybody who is
reserved and retiring need be in danger of mental disorder, yet there
are persons of just this type of make-up that are less able than others
to stand the strains of isolation, of inferiority feeling, of exalted
ambitions and one-sided longings, intolerable desires, etc. The same
individual difference of susceptibility holds even for alcohol. With
this recognition we came to lay stress again on the specific factors
which make for the deterioration of habits, for tantrums with
imaginations, and for drifting into abnormal behavior, and conditions
incompatible with health.

It was at this point that our great indebtedness to the Bloomingdale
Hospital began. Dr. August Hoch, then First Assistant of the
Bloomingdale Hospital, began to swing more and more toward the
psychobiological trend of views, and with his devoted and very able
friend Amsden he compiled that remarkable outline,[2] which was the
first attempt to reduce the new ideals of psychobiology to a practical
scheme of personality study--that clear and plain questionnaire going
directly at human traits and reactions such as we all know and can see
at work without any special theories or instruments.

After studying in each patient all the non-mental disorders such as
infections, intoxications, and the like, we can now also attack the
problems of life which can be understood only in terms of plain and
intelligible human relations and activities, and thus we have learned to
meet on concrete ground the real essence of mind and soul--the plain and
intelligible human activities and relations to self and others. There
are in the life records of our patients certain ever-returning
tendencies and situations which a psychiatry of exclusive brain