I’ve just opened Ernest Wolf’s 1988 text The Psychology of the Self and got stuck (in a good, ponderous way) at this quote:
It is plausible, for example, that in the extended upper middle-class family of Freud’s Vienna, the child was not neglected, but overstimulated in an ambience of hypersexuality precisely because the mores of the day favored that sex be hush-hush and illicit, not to be talked about but enjoyed on the sly. The degree of preoccupation with sexuality in those days of Victorian puritanism can be gathered by recalling that in some o the best houses piano legs were draped with skirts so as to be neither overstimulating nor offensive. Today, in contrast, litlte remains hidden about sexuality. Furthermore, and this is probably of the greatest importance, the extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, cooks, maids, governesses, and so forth has mostly shrunk to the core family of siblings and parents, none of whom are at home enough to be easily and generously available to the youngsters. The key person for needed selfobject responsiveness, the mother, is much more liekely to have to go to twork, and, at any rate, to be more overworked and harrassed by the multiplicity of demands made on her than her grandmother was. Institutional substitutes such as schools and day care centers have yet to demonstrate that they can provide a child with sufficient stimulation and psychological nourishment, that is with appropriate selfobject experiences, to avoid the child’s feeling uncared for and unresponded to. In contemporary society, therefore, the shrinking importance of the family results in a gradual impoverishmnet of the self-sustaining aspects of the selfobject experiences that the child has. This may be one explanation for the apparently increasing morbidity of narcissistic disorders, that is, disorders of the self. One also wonders whether the increasing seriousness of drug abuse among young people and the steadily increasing suicide rate during the last two decades could be related to the shifting child rearing patterns that are deficient in self-sustaining and self-supporting experiences.
Note that this was written in 1988, a period now considered by some to be the good old days of family values. This passage, to me, demonstrates how much society has changed over the last 100 years, and how much our perceptions of “neuroses” and mental illness change over time.
If a kidney, heart, or lung is diseased, that means that on a physical and organic level it is functioning improperly. Mental illness, as we perceive it, is not always a case of deficient brain performance. The biologists and neuroscientist study mental illness and see a case of chemical or organic irregularities. 
The psychologist, by contrast, is asked to look at patterns of thinking in sometimes organically very functional brains. Wolf’s paragraph unintentionally directs our thinking to the question of what is to be considered mental illness. Should mental illness be defined as including behavior that is eccentric and outside the norm (narcissism, extremes in personality characteristics, temporary depression, etc.) or do we limit the definition to purely organic and material aberrations?
I think the answer is obvious: organically and chemically normal functioning brains can still result in behaviors that make it difficult for the individual to functionally interact within his or her environment. It is just this sort of qualitative criteria that makes a purely quantitative and “scientific” psychology so difficult.
