Proceedings of the International Conference of Women Physicians Volume 1-3

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1920 Excerpt: ... THE INNER CONFLICT AND THE SOCIAL UNREST Herbert E. Cory, Ph.d. Mr. Olds has spoken to you very forcefully this morning about what you may do for the laborers and, to a certain extent, of what you may teach the laborers. I think that I may go on in a way, not in the least incompatible with his, to state something of what we may learn from the laborers, that is, particularly those of us who are interested in psychiatry for social work, the inner conflict and the social unrest. The inner conflict in a psycho-analytical sense or in any modern psychological sense and the social unrest have more than an analogous relation. Now, the psychiatrists of the old type, unfortunately still with us, would say that they have this relation, that the social unrest (or, to use the socialistic term, the class struggle) is a projection. I suppose the psychiatrist of the older type would say that a man or a woman who is not at peace with his or her own soul projects that unrest on the community, finds capitalism unjust, flies into a torrent of moral denunciations, grows restless, feverish, wanders abroad, faithless to the task of the day. That, I think, is in many cases the interpretation of the social unrest that one hears from psychiatrists of the older school. The psychiatrists of the older school developed their traditions during that period, the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, when the old eighteenth century belief in the equality of man had suffered a serious disillusionment. The contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson in England, Thomas Jefferson himself and the great French thinkers, revolutionists like Condorcet who wrote about progress while awaiting he knew not what fate in prison, these people believed very strongly, in some sense or other, in the equal...