IN the more recent history of psychiatry, a major trend has been its increasing participation in meeting the mental health needs of the community and in expanding into more broadly social areas. A testament to this development was the First International Congress of Social Psychiatry held in London, August 1964.
As far back as 1922 Freud1 stated:
The contrast between Individual Psychology and Social or Group Psychology which at first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that Individual Psychology is concerned with the individual man . . . but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is Individual Psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent,