Prediction: Yesterday and Today
CLINICIANS are, as Martin Grotjahn once said, better predictors of the past than of the future. This seems to be the case in regard to the development of outpatient clinics. When clinics were first organized, it was apparent that the clinic model gripped contemporary psychiatry, jarring both theoretical and organizational precepts. Nevertheless, the outpatient clinic proved to be a sleeper. Who predicted in the Commonwealth days that a handful of demonstration child guidance clinics would 40 years later have multiplied 65-fold? Who foresaw the magnetic way a community would converge on a clinic so that its projections and expectations would shape the clinic, and then in turn be shaped by it? Who appreciated that in the move of psychiatrist from state hospital to outpatient clinic lay the rudiments of the recently rediscovered community psychiatry?
In the early 1920's,