Clergymen, Teachers, and Psychiatrists: A Study in Roles and Socialization

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Abstract
Experience, not design, first confronted me with contrasts in the roles of clergymen, teachers, and psychiatrists. On second thoughts these contrasts seemed theoretically important. Their importance will here be assessed on the basis of a tradition of developing thought that as such must, however, be taken for granted. Still, the concrete observations from which this essay takes its departure, as well as the conditions under which they were made and initially interpreted, need prior attention. Subsequently various theoretical proposals will then have their proper balance in material that at best can illustrate them. Rigorous assessment must, as usual, come later still.For four years I was on the staff of “a mental health project,” called the Human Relations Service, as a sociologist. It was the intention of this project to extend the traditional patterns of psychiatric practice and to gather relevant knowledge about matters of emotional balance to be found in a town of 20 thousand fairly well-to-do people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The staff of the project included psychiatrists, a psychiatric social worker, clinical psychologists, and various social scientists. Administratively the H.R.S. was linked with the community through an executive committee the chairman of which was the local Unitarian minister. The project, in other words, was committed to research as well as service, including short-term psychotherapy.

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