A Sustaining Zeitgeist 343believed the prestige of psychology had been enhanced by its
contributions to the war effort. (See Weiner’s chapter on as-
sessment in this volume for further details on the testing
movement at this time.)
On December 28, 1917, an organization known as the
American Association of Clinical Psychologists (AACP) was
founded by J. E. Wallin, Leta Hollingworth, Rudolf Pintner,
and three others. Aside from conviviality, the AACP came
into being because clinicians wanted a group that would be
forceful in addressing their concerns, such as mental tests
being administered by nonqualified examiners and clinicians
gaining legal recognition as experts in the determination of
mental retardation and psychopathology.
Robert Yerkes, the president of the APA at the time and
also a member of AACP, negotiated with the dissidents and
convinced them their interests would be best served through
the APA. Accordingly the AACP went out of existence in
1919 and became the Clinical Section of the APA, the first of
what were to become the many divisions of that organization.
About the only activity of the AACP during its brief life was
to sponsor a symposium at the 1918 APA convention. The
room was so jammed with people that it was not possible to
present this program, but the papers were published the next
year in the Journal of Applied Psychology. David Mitchell is
regarded as the first to earn his living through private prac-
tice; he obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylva-
nia (Meltzer, 1966; Mitchell, 1919, 1931) and reported that
his treatment approach involved strengthening and eliminat-
ing habits.
The number of child-guidance clinics began to grow dur-
ing the 1920s with the support of the Commonwealth Fund,
established by the Harkness family which also funded the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene to seek the causes
and prevention of juvenile delinquency. These clinics, usu-
ally staffed by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social
workers and concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of
child problems of all sorts, from infancy through adoles-
cence, served as additional sources of employment for clini-
cians. By 1930, there were about 500 clinics in the United
States offering psychiatric services, of which about 125 were
child guidance; by 1936, there were 676 psychiatric clinics
and 87 psycho-educational clinics, the latter mostly affiliated
with colleges and directed by psychologists.
In 1924, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger met with a group
of colleagues at the Institute for Juvenile Research to form
the American Orthopsychiatric Association. Its first president
was William Healy. Although voting membership in the
group was initially restricted to psychiatrists, this restriction
was dropped within 2 years. Among the clinical psycholo-
gists in this organization were Lightner Witmer, Augusta
Bronner, Shepherd Franz (one of the first clinical neuropsy-
chologists), Henry Goddard, and Edgar Doll (1920). The as-
sociation soon began publication of a journal, The American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry,which still focuses on interdisci-
plinary research and advocacy regarding the mental health
problems of children and families.
John B. Watson returned from service in World War I and
set about to determine what unconditioned stimuli produce
what unconditioned emotional responses in infants. He was
particularly interested in fear and was aware that Freud
(1909/1959) had presented a case of a boy who had a phobia
of horses, which through analysis was discovered to be a fear
of his father. Watson found that loud noises and sudden loss of
support elicit fear in infants and that by pairing a loud noise
with a white rat, a fear response could not only be conditioned
to the rodent but could be generalized to other furry objects
(Watson & Raynor, 1920). Unfortunately the infant, Albert,
became unavailable for Watson to extinguish the response.
However, Mary Cover Jones (1924), subsequently a promi-
nent developmental psychologist, did demonstrate that a
child’s fear of rabbits could be reconditioned by bringing a
rabbit closer and closer while the boy ate lunch. Here was ev-
idence, Watson believed, to suggest that some irrational fears
in children might be brought about and treated through condi-
tioning and without any need to invoke unconscious conflicts.
Nevertheless, psychoanalytic concepts were winning the
day. They were gaining in popularity among mental health
professionals. Morton Prince was moved to remark: “Freudian
psychology had flooded the field like a full rising tide and the
rest of us were left submerged like clams in the sands at low
water” (quoted by Hale, 1971, p. 434). In 1924, William
Alanson White, then president of the American Psychiatric
Association, urged psychiatrists to incorporate psychoana-
lytic concepts into their thinking and to use analysis to gain
fresh insights into mental illness. Psychologists were im-
pressed not only by Freud’s ideas but by the ideas of those
who disagreed with Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his no-
tions about the significance of birth order and the inferiority
complex, and Carl Jung and his introvert/extrovert personal-
ity types. Moreover, there were new tests of personality, like
the Rorschach and the TAT, which relied upon an apprecia-
tion and an understanding of unconscious functioning to be
administered and interpreted. Further, there began to be a
new way of looking at neurosis, as illustrated in the analyst
Karen Horney’s (1937) book, The Neurotic Personality of
Our Time. Neuroses, Horney argued, are brought about by
disturbances in interpersonal relations, and their symptoms
are determined by their culture and period. The conditions
that existed for Freud differ from those that are current. Were
we to analyze our culture, we would find different kinds of