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If we were to summarize in the briefest way the advance of recent years in psychiatric teaching, we should be obliged to group what is to be said around a very conscious use of the conception of adaptation or adjustment of the individual to the needs presented within himself and by his environment. Problems involving the instinctive urgency for adjustment, the reaction of the individual in his failure to adjust himself, the alternatives automatically resorted to when for any reason there is resistance to adjustment, the interplay of partial adjustments and of alternatives—fortunate and unfortunate—have formed topics of intensive studies which have furnished the tools of modern psychiatric practice. ' Gradually these studies have brought into the foreground certain features and have, by detailed exposition, so adequately demonstrated their importance and significance that we are now justified in taking for granted that, wherever these particular features are found, there has been