| Summary: | "Abnormal psychology has three main divisions. The first is the study of mental abnormality in immediate relation to disturbances in the body (especially in the brain). The second is the study of patients suffering from more or less serious mental disease, whose condition necessitates not so much an emphasis upon bodily factors as a careful examination of their background and the psychological factors which underlie their trouble. Naturally there lies between these two a large debatable territory in which sometimes a physical and sometimes a psychological approach seems required. We may, if we wish, disregard the distinction, and call the region covered by the first two provinces by the name of psychiatry ("healing of the mind"). Our third province includes the study of a great variety of normal or almost-normal phenomena which throw light upon the abnormal, and the thousand transitional states between the definitely normal and the definitely abnormal. The chief purposes of this volume are first, to give the reader an introduction to some common forms of mental disorder which are understandable in terms of psychological principles, and second, to indicate some of the paths which lead from the normal to the abnormal, and--fortunately--often lead back again to the Normal." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).
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