HE individual who enters a mental hospital finds himself placed in a T number of new social situations, all of which influence his behavior and treatment. The patient's relationship to his therapist, both in its administrative and therapeutic aspects, has received the most study. This holds true where the course of treatment is through insight psychotherapy (13, 14), and also where it involves a structuring of the patient's social milieu by prescribing how hospital personnel shall react to him (1, 31, 40). More recently, the influence on the patient of the over-all social structure of the hospital has been investigated (2, 34, 3 9 , as well as the structure of certain types of wards (9, lo), and the social processes a t work in the split social field existing between patients and staff (21, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42).For information on a third social influence, the interpersonal relationships of patients with each other, we must, however, rely largely on patients' autobiographical accounts of their experiences (3, 7, 19, 23, 24, 33). Despite 14 This is, of course, part of the problem of parataxic distortion discussed by Sullivan (41). is The occurrence of such phenomena would seem to make it essential that a systematic understanding be gained of that behavior by patients on the ward which is attributable more to factors in the immediate social situation, and of that behavior which is attributable more to factors in their psychodynamic histories. Once such understanding is gained it would then be possible to investigate a second and very complex problem. This second problem concerns the effect of the patient group on the course of individual behavior that has its main inception in repetitive neurotic patterns. In the hospital the individual is pro-
