J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 187 



This period not merely marks a new phase in Rivers 's work, but 

 is also characterised by a distinct change in his personahty and writings. 

 In entering the Army and in investigating the psychoneuroses he was 

 fulfilUng the desires of his youth. Whether through the reahsation of 

 such long-discarded or suppressed wishes, or through other causes, e.g. 

 the gratified desii'e of a.n opportunity for more sympathetic insight into 

 the mental life of his fellows, he became another and a far happier 

 man. Diffidence gave place to confidence, hesitation to certainty, 

 reticence to outspokenness, a somewhat laboured literary style to one 

 i-emarkable for its ease and charm. Over forty publications can be 

 traced to these years, between 1916 and the date of his death. It 

 was a period in which his genius was released from its former shackles, 

 iu which intuition was less co-ntrolled by intellectual doubt, in which 

 inspiration bro'ught with it the usual accompaniment of emotional con- 

 viction — even an occasional impatience with those who failed to accept 

 his point oi view. But his honest, generous character remained 

 unchanged tO' the last. Ever willing to devote himself unsparingly to a 

 cause he believed right, or to give of his best to help a fellow-being 

 in mental distress, he worked with an indomitable self-denying energy, 

 won the gratitude and affection of numberless nerve-shattered soldier- 

 patients, whom he treated with unsurpassed judgment and success, and 

 attracted all kinds of people to- this new aspect of psychology. 

 Painters, poets, authors, artisans, all came to recognise the value of 

 his work, to seek, to win, and to appreciate his sympathy and his 

 friendship. It was characteristic of his thoroughness that while 

 attached to the Eoyal Air Force he took numerous flights, ' looping the 

 loop ' and performing other trying evolutions in the air, so that he 

 might gain adequate experience of flying and bei able tO' treat his 

 patients and to test candidates satisfactorily. He had the courage to 

 defend much of Freud's new teaching at a time when it was carelessly 

 condemned in toto by those in authority who werei too' ignorant or too 

 incompetent to form any just opinion of its undoubted merits and 

 undoubted defects. He was prepared tO' admit the importance of the 

 conflict of social factors with the sexual instincts in certain psycho- 

 neuroses of civil life, but in the psychoneuroses of w^arfare and of 

 occupations like mining he believed that tlie conflicting instincts were 

 not sexual, but were the danger instincts, related to the instinct of 

 sel f -preservation . 



Thus in the best sense of the term Rivers became a man of the 

 world and no longer a man of the laboratory and of the study. He 

 found time to- serve on the Medical Research Council's Air Medical 

 Investigation Committee, on its Mental Disorders Committee, on its 

 Miners' Nystagmus Committee, and on the Psychological Committee 

 of its Industrial Fatigue Research Board. He served on a committee, 

 of ecclesiastical complexion, appointed to inquire into the new psycho- 

 therapy, and he had many close friends among the missionaries, to whom 

 he gave and from whom he received assistance in the social and 

 ethnological side of their work. 



In 1919, in which year he received honorary degrees from the 

 IJniversities of St. Andrews and Manchester, he returned to Cambridge 



