342 Clinical Psychology
reluctant to become involved in what many of its members
considered extraneous issues, such as what the qualifications
of a psychological examiner were and whether clinical psy-
chologists should be supported when their expertise was
challenged by psychiatrists. Not surprisingly, while there
may have been a need for the services of clinical psycholo-
gists in the society at large, at this stage in the development of
the field there was little demand.
Accordingly, the training of clinicians was haphazard and
without any uniformity. A few universities provided education
for clinicians, but most professionals had to take what courses
they could in college and seek further training on the job in
mental hospitals and clinics. In the former setting, they
thought of themselves as primarily researchers in abnormal
functioning; in the latter, they regarded themselves as mainly
psychometricians and educators with children. (It should be
remembered that the first individually administered intelli-
gence scale standardized on adults, the Wechsler-Bellevue, did
not become available until 1939.) With these sobering qualifi-
cations stated, let us note some of the positive influences.
Morton Prince (1854–1929), a neurologist at Tufts Med-
ical College, founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychologyin
1906 and served as its editor for many years. He was particu-
larly interested in hysteria and multiple personalities and
thought that the same processes that govern learning can be
used to explain abnormal behaviors. Neuroses, for example,
were often perversions of associations, because neurotics
often had difficulties in recalling the past. Psychotherapies,
he concluded, are actually different ways of educating people
to associate differently and thus adjust better to their environ-
ments (Prince, 1909–1910). While working in Boston, Prince
met with a congenial circle of physicians and psychologists,
including Boris Sidis and William James, to discuss psy-
chopathology and its treatment. He was sympathetic to psy-
choanalysis and through his journal helped to make it known.
In 1927, he founded the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and
by making it a unit of the Department of Psychology, he
sought to ensure that the study of personality and psy-
chopathology was regarded as part of psychology rather than
psychiatry.
William James received a visit in 1906 from a former
mental patient who had written a book about his experiences
in treatment. The book was titled A Mind That Found Itself,
and its author was Clifford Beers (1908). James read the
manuscript and wrote a letter of endorsement, which be-
came part of the book’s introduction and which served to
bring others to Beers’s support. Clifford Beers (1876–1943)
wanted to establish a movement that would make the public
aware of mental illness and willing to provide for its allevi-
ation and treatment. This became known as the mental
hygiene movement, and Beers founded the first of its many
societies in Connecticut in 1908.
That same year a prominent social worker, Julia Lathrop,
met with a psychiatrist, William Healy (1869–1963), in
Chicago to consider what new approaches to juvenile delin-
quency might be of help. At that time, judges disposed of
delinquents with nothing more than the results of a physical
examination to guide them. Certainly their decisions could be
better informed, and as a first step, research might be con-
ducted to determine the causes of delinquency. Healy went
off to get ideas by meeting with James and other psycholo-
gists and by visiting the clinics of Witmer and Goddard. In-
fluenced by the favorable recommendation of William James,
Julia Lathrop asked Healy to be the director of the new clinic,
which, when it opened in 1909, was called the Juvenile Psy-
chopathic Institute and today is known as the Institute for
Juvenile Research. Its original staff consisted of Healy; a
clinical psychologist, Grace Fernald (who later moved to
California, where she developed innovative practices for
remediating reading disorders in children and where a school
was named in her honor by UCLA); and a secretary. Many
consider it the first child-guidance clinic in the world.
A number of judges visited Healy’s clinic, with the idea in
mind to assess whether a similar operation could work with
their courts. During the summers of 1912 and 1913, Healy
taught a course at Harvard describing his work, and in 1917
he and Augusta Bronner, a clinical psychologist whom he
married, moved to Boston to establish the Judge Baker Guid-
ance Clinic. The focus of these clinics affiliated with the
courts was to evaluate children by means of psychological
tests, mainly intelligence tests, and other means in order to
make recommendations to juvenile-court judges regarding
the disposition of their cases. Healy, it should be added,
thought of himself not only as a psychiatrist but also as a clin-
ical psychologist; he developed two performance measures
of intelligence, one of which, the Healy Picture Completion
Test, was quite popular in its day.
During World War I, Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), a com-
parative psychologist at Yale (who later had primate labora-
tories, now at Emory University, named in his honor) and
also a clinician who made the Binet into a point scale (Yerkes,
Bridges, & Hardwick, 1915), chaired a committee of psy-
chologists that was asked to develop a group-administered
scale of intelligence for the army. This committee produced
the Army Alpha, a verbal scale; the Army Beta, which was
nonverbal and intended for those who could not read English;
and the Personal Data Sheet, a neurotic inventory designed
by Robert Woodworth that was one of the earliest personality
questionnaires (Yerkes, 1919). Almost two million men were
assessed with the Army Alpha and Beta tests, and Yerkes