There are ominous clouds in my view of the future of psychiatry. Perhaps I can find some flickers of hope; at least there is the possibility that prophecy may help to stave off disaster. Study of the recent past of psychiatry reveals rather clearly that the line of progress in this field is not straight up; instead, we see, particularly with regard to the more visible hospital population, cyclic, up-and-down trends. We do, presumably, make some progress, but the tendency to cycle seems stronger than the thrust upward. I recall my surprise some years ago at learning that the first half of the nineteenth century, the period of "moral therapy," was an era of enlightenment with results equal to our current best. The treatment was humanistic and optimistic, directed to the whole person with emphasis on individual regimens of work and recreation, religious and educational services, and care by a sympathetic superintendent and well-disciplined attendants.1 The light went out sometime about 1860. Psychiatry slid into a prolonged era of dehumanized practice, warehousing patients in monstrous asylums from which few ever emerged. This nadir of psychiatry coincided with the development of the new medicine that was making notable advances in finding organic causes and cures for many age-old plagues. Unfortunately, the bulk of the common mental disorders did not yield to this advancing medical technology. Answers were not found, even after decades of careful classification and microscopic brain tissue examination, to the riddles of schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, neurosis, and character disorder. In the late 1940's we saw a change. Enough people became interested in talking with patients again to spark the emergence of a new humanistic era. Most likely the psychoanalysts and their imitators should be given much of the credit for the breakthrough. Though Freud believed in an ultimate organic cause for psychiatric illness, he encouraged mental health workers to know their patients and help them with psychological insights while waiting for answers to be discovered under the microscope. Interest in the psychology of the individual led to concern about life in the family, various