Lionel Sharples Penrose was born in London on 11 June 1898. He came of Quaker stock and was brought up according to the principles of the Society of Friends. The Quaker education he received and his service in the Friends’ Ambulance Train in France during World War I, immediately after leaving school, confirmed him in his compassionate interest in human suffering and in his detestation of war.

Amark (1951, p. 154) discovered a high frequency of ixoid and ixothymic personality traits resembling those encountered among epileptics in a clinical material (49.5 per cent), and institutional material (38.0 per cent) and a material from the Temperance Board (37.1 per cent). Amark's description of these ‘epileptoid’ personality traits (1951, p. 151)) which also covers normal character variations, is fairly wide and includes a tendency to perseveration, adhesiveness, explosions or dysphoric states of dejection, querulousness and paranoid reactions. In a previous study (Kristianson, 1970, p. 173) it was suggested that Amark probably overestimated the frequencies of ixoid and ixothymic personalities, because alcoholics are so often explosive. But this quite unspecific pattern of behaviour is not sufficient for the diagnosis of ‘epileptoid’ traits, if this concept is to have a reasonable definition. Explosive aggressiveness is scarcely a primary personality trait, but is one of the symptoms of a deterioration in the chronic alcoholic's mental condition. However, it is important to differentiate these explosive aggressive reactions caused by chronic alcoholism from the adequately defined personality traits of epileptics. This problem of differentiation will be analysed in greater detail in this study.

On 17 November 1969, Dr. A. A. Baker, then Senior Principal Medical Officer, Department of Health and Social Security, sent a letter to consultants at mental subnormality hospitals in which he requested them to introduce the World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases, Eighth Edition, 1965, in the completion of Mental Health Inquiry Index Cards. The booklet A Glossary of Mental Disorders, No. 22 in the General Register Office Studies on Medical and Population Subjects was enclosed with the letter for information and to facilitate the use of the Classification.

The opportunity to conduct a prevalence study of psychiatric disorder among young adolescents arose because a Family and Community Project had been established in Blackburn and the neighbouring town of Accrington. This Project, which is under the direction of Dr. G. Rose, aims to study the causes and possible methods of prevention of delinquency. As part of the survey, the secondary school population had been screened by means of questionnaires given to parents, teachers, and the children themselves, and this provided the starting point for the study described here.

This paper reports the finding of one section of the third of a series of surveys on the training and background of a group of recently appointed consultant psychiatrists. The original survey was a postal enquiry primarily concerned with training, which was circulated to every consultant psychiatrist in the United Kingdom who had been appointed to a post in general psychiatry, with at least 6 N.H.S. sessions, between 1 October 1963 and 30 September 1966 (Royal Medico-Psychological Association, 1969). The second survey, using a different form of questionnaire, and enquiring more closely into background and motives for going into the specialty, was circulated to consultants appointed between the 1 October 1966 and 30 September 1969 (Brook, 1972; Brook, 1973).

To achieve a successful marital partnership is probably the most difficult of life's social requirements, whether successful is defined biologically as the production of healthy offspring or in the more human terms as achieving a relationship which allows each partner to lead a satisfying life. To be successful each marital partner must often defer to the other, especially if there are dependent children present. Failure to show this capacity to defer or to be unselfish inevitably leads to conflict, and conflict can easily build up to the point of violence. The ethological study of animal reproduction, including that of primates, shows how universally true this is and what a wealth of convention and ritual is developed to reduce such dangerous confrontation.

One of the most important contributions of child psychiatry to the general raising of standards of child care has been the identification of various abnormal life experiences which appear to be harmful to healthy emotional development. Two outstanding contributions, the descriptions of ‘institutionalization’ (Goldfarb, 1944; Bender and Yarnell, 1941) and ‘maternal deprivation’ (Bowlby, 1951) have had considerable impact on the organization of children's homes and the setting up of services designed to prevent family breakdown.

Ferenczi (1927, orig. 1911) thought that on clinical grounds he had clearly established two types of homosexual males. One type combined masculinity and a preference for pubescents, and the other type combined femininity with a preference for physically mature partners. However, Hirschfeld (1920, p. 267, 277, orig. 1914), who had examined a very large number of homosexual males, doubted the existence of any relationship between femininity and age preference.

Even though I do not propose to discuss the work of Professor Penrose directly, I should like to express my appreciation to the organizers of this symposium in his memory for giving me an opportunity to pay tribute to a man whom I regard as having been both my teacher and my friend.

Emotional illness in psychiatric post-graduate trainees has been the topic of several papers in recent years (1, 2, 3). In summary, these papers suggest that emotional illness in psychiatric training is common. Anxiety and depression characterize these illnesses and occur most frequently in the first year of training. But, as Halleck and Woods have stated, ‘Information as to the prevalence of anxiety states, depression, suicide, psychoses or serious acting out is unavailable’ (4).