Many workers on both sides of the Atlantic have done intensive work on the Rh factor since its discovery was first published in 1940. The great majority of these workers have been concerned essentially with its influence on physical disease, the mental aspects being either ignored entirely or only lightly touched upon.

Sexuality is ambivalent because love is expressed biologically in the primitive terms of life—we kill or we die. Mating, according to the psychosomatic theory of family sexuality (Turner, 1947), is accomplished by a portrayal of the conditions of the hunt. The male portrays his hunting of the inferior species. The female in mating, therefore, is identified with the inferior species until the orgasm, when she is identified with the superior species which kills the hunting male. The female loves the male, who pledges his hunting, and the male loves the female, who pledges herself by enacting the environmental realities which he meets when hunting. Thus the young are provided for in ambivalence by a hunting father, and by a mother who teaches them to hunt by presenting to them the conditions of the hunt. Thus by further sublimation of the primitive ambivalence the father is the civilized breadwinner and the mother one's first guide, philosopher and friend.

The complex interpersonal relationships which establish themselves when people meet and interact reveal a number of bipolar aspects or trends, such as liking—dislike, competition—co-operation, dominance—subordination, identification—counter-identification, and others. Of these the relationships of friendliness and dominance have been selected for study, not because they are considered of greater intrinsic importance for the dynamics or therapeutic efficacy of groups than other interpersonal trends, but because they are accessible to a fair degree of measurement and numerical handling. They can thus render impressions which have been gained through group observation more definite and reliable; they may even correct them or point to aspects which had escaped notice.

The theory that physique and temperament are correlated remains a subject of controversy. Various workers in the field differ in their findings and, in the past, investigations on body build and its psychological correlates have been handicapped by lack of precise knowledge of the variations in body build. In recent years improved statistical methods of analysis have been applied to the study of body build, enabling the variations in physique to be analysed and assessed inductively.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) of Murray first appeared in 1935; it consists of a series of pictures on cards, 20 of which are shown to the subject with an injunction to make up a short story based on what the people in the pictures are doing, thinking or feeling, and what he thinks the outcome will be. The theory is, of course, that the subject will “project” into his responses his own attitudes, moods, drives, desires, etc., and the TAT has for this reason been called a fantasy test (Masserman, 1947). Elaborate scoring methods have been developed with a high degree of inter-examiner correlation (see Murray, 1938; Rapaport, 1946; Rotter, 1940; Tomkins, 1947; Wyatt, 1947), but they are rather too complex and time-consuming for ordinary clinical purposes and all too often the examiner may fall back on a method of intuitive interpretation, evaluating responses in the light of his psychopathological knowledge and experience—that is, using experience derived from free association in a situation that is designed primarily to produce a controlled associative process. It would not, of course, be the first time that a scientific solecism had been the means of justifying a therapeutic end, but here there are two logical errors. First, the facts are being selected to fit the theory, and as Harrison (1943) says, “the analyst may project into his interpretations his private personality theories or even his own personality”; second, the experimental findings are not being evaluated against normal controls. The intuitive method is thus seen to be personal, subjective and unstandardized. The aim of psychometrics, however, is the measurement of personality factors, and measurement, says Carr (1925), must be “impersonal, objective and standard.”

The period of adolescence includes within its span the shorter phase of puberty, and may extend from prepuberty as early as ten years (1) to adult maturity attained perhaps in the early twenties. A study of psychosis in adolescence must therefore take cognizance both of the psychoses of later childhood and of early adult life.

Though it is now generally accepted that prefrontal leucotomy has an effect on the subject's behaviour, its mode of action and the intermediate stages of its effect are still obscure. Some evidence, which has been sufficiently reviewed elsewhere (Meyer and McLardy, 1949; Fleming, 1944), suggests that the operation acts by lessening emotional drive: the retrograde degeneration which usually occurs in the dorso-medial and anterior thalamic nuclei points to this. Clinically, however, the belief rests on little more than impressions. In order to obtain more objective evidence, we have used the psychogalvanic response, not because it measures emotional change with fidelity, but because it is one of the few objective tests available. Though its precise relation to emotional change is still not clear, that it does have some relation has been demonstrated repeatedly. We have therefore attempted to compare the sizes of the response before and after the operation.

This is a clinical and pathological report on an unusual case of periarteritis nodosa in which the disease was confined chiefly to the brain and spinal cord. The diffuseness, variability and intermittency of the neurological signs and symptoms over a period of two years, in the absence of many of the more usual somatic manifestations of periarteritis nodosa, was responsible for the nature of the disorder not being diagnosed before death. Mental symptoms were prominent throughout the last year of illness. T.A.B. pyrexial therapy coincided with a marked remission in physical and mental symptoms, whilst arsenical therapy appeared to precipitate the terminal exacerbation of symptoms.

The Rorschach personality test is based on the stirrings of imagination. The interpretation of the structureless inkblots by the tested person stimulates his imagination in such a way that he projects his inner thoughts into the responses. Imagination is not merely one of the functions of a personality, but it is an expression of the personality as a whole. Medieval thinkers have described this by calling imagination “the star of man,” by which they meant the essence of his personality. This is the reason why the Rorschach method is a valid test for the assessing of personality.

It is widely recognized that judgment of time may be grossly disturbed in amnesic states of organic origin. Korsakoff (1890), in his classic exposition of the syndrome which has come to bear his name, pointed out that memory for time is often more severely affected than memory for events, and that temporal reference may remain markedly defective, even after remission of the psychosis. Thus one of his patients was able to recall recent events with fair accuracy, but was unable to state whether a given event had occurred yesterday or three years before. After recovery, moreover, this patient presented disturbances in the temporal sphere as the most outspoken residual symptom. Korsakoff further observed that defects of temporal localization might appear as the most prominent manifestation in mild cases of the amnesic syndrome. It would seem, then, that disorders of time judgment form an integral part of this syndrome and may well reflect a disturbance of memory at its highest levels of psychological organization.

Tredgold (1948) points out that the “importance of studying the mental health of British troops in the Far East … is unlikely to have diminished with the end of the war,” and he emphasizes that “as long as conscription exists, the mental health of the young man doing his military service will be of great importance to the welfare of the community.” For this latter reason the writer has thought it desirable to report some of the experience he gained during 1948. At that time, he was one of the two psychiatrists stationed in Singapore who dealt with the vast majority of the psychiatric casualties that occurred in the Far East.