In the 1950s in America, the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis began to be reexamined and expanded as more cases of mental distress and disorders that no one knew how to treat were discovered. These cases could often be linked to an overarching theme, namely unhappiness in one aspect of an individual's life. This problem area could relate to home life, work, social status, or a number of other areas. No matter what the root of the problem was, the problem always caused a person to feel irrelevant and their mind to move in a negative spiral until they were no longer, by society's terms, sane. Existentialists, those who believe that individuals should be responsible for developing as they want and when they want, viewed these supposedly crazy people as developing at their own pace. They did not believe, however, that these people were discovering the meaning of their lives because, more often than not, they were dissatisfied with their lives. Existentialists believed that when you don't aim for a specific goal or don't want to find meaning in your life, you aren't living your life the way it was intended. The existential view emphasized that a person or individual was responsible for determining his or her own development on his or her own terms and for discovering the meaning of life. When the mind gets in the way, in cases such as psychopathy, it does not allow the individual to discover the true meaning of their life as their judgment may be clouded by their current state of mind. The mind has great power in deciding whether a person will be successful on the existential path or whether he will take the path of psychopathy. This power can do a lot of good to a person, but it can also cause them a lot of stress and harm... middle of paper... and react in the socially and culturally acceptable way. That is, in a way that allows the individual to be content with their life while still being a positive influence on those around them and without being destructive in any way. Their methods of manipulating the mind and learning to deal with problems that arose from a mind were some of the most revolutionary discoveries made during that time, and in many ways, the way Americans imagined the mind to be was correct and the research they conducted was beneficial to society. As apt as their research was at the time, things have changed in the last sixty years and it is likely that their findings and mind-imagined ideas are no longer relevant. It would have been impossible for them to successfully discover all the secrets of the mind, and there are probably many more to be discovered even now.