American psychiatry has tended to divide into two camps—one seeking to understand persons as bodies, and the other seeking to understand them in terms of a mechanistic mental life. Both these approaches, while rewarding in certain respects, fail in the quest of understanding persons as persons. Since psychiatry is rooted in this type of understanding, it is unfortunate that the division within its ranks should be along lines which confuse the major issue of psychiatry and obstruct the development of a systematic understanding of persons which is the major task of psychiatry.