Psychiatry, the healthy invalid.

The author examines the reasons that have been offered in support of a pressimistic appraisal of psychiatry's future. The consequences for psychiatry of increasingly detailed knowledge of the interaction of psychological and physiological processes are emphasized, and the author concludes that psychiatry will continue to play a dominant role in the study and treatment of medical and surgical illness. Thus, although the field is in a transition period, it is certainly not moribund.