The New Marriage: Pediatrics and Psychology

Abstract

I WAS MOST willing to speak at this meeting because I sense a new liaison between the behavioral sciences and pediatrics, and I feel a bit like a participant in an ecumenical council. I am excited by the contemporary marriage between pediatrics and the social sciences, a marriage that should lead to a corpus of cognitive products that would not have occurred had each remained single for much longer. I do not wish to celebrate this new relation by reminding us of the mutual intellectual gains of cross-disciplinary work. These gains are relatively obvious and can be summarized succinctly. A liaison between pediatric and psychological inquiry forces the behavioral scientist into direct contact with psychopathology. This often brutal exposure has two immediate therapeutic effects. First, it forces a questioning of any rigid theoretical orthodoxy which the social scientist might have been hiding under, for the chasm between the best of