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Page 6
Of all the divisions of medicine, psychiatry has suffered longest from
man's groping for a conception of his own nature. Psychiatry means,
literally, the healing of souls. What then do we actually mean by soul
or by psyche? This question has too long been treated as a disturbing
puzzle.
To-day we feel that modern psychiatry has found itself--through the
discovery that, after all, the uncritical common-sense view of mind and
soul is not so far remote from a critical common-sense view of the
individual and its life activity, freed from the forbidding and
confusing assumptions through which the concept of mind and soul has
been held in bewildering awe.
Strange to say, good old Aristotle was nearer an understanding than most
of the wise men and women that have succeeded him for these more than
two thousand years. He saw in the psyche what he called the form and
realization or fulfilment of the human organism; he would probably now
say with us, the activity and function as an individual or person.
Through the disharmonies and inevitable disruption of a
self-disorganizing civilization, the Greek and Roman world was plunged
into the dark centuries during which the perils of the soul and the
sacrificial attainment of salvation by monastic life and crusades
threatened to overshadow all other concern. This had some inevitable
results: it favored all those views through which the soul became like a
special thing or substance, in contrast to and yet a counterpart of the
physical body. As long as there was no objective experimental science,
the culminating solution of life problems had to be intrusted to that
remarkable development of religious philosophy which arose from the
blending of Hebrew religion and tradition and the loftiest products of
the Greek mind, in the form which St. Paul and the early Church fathers
gave to the teachings of Christ. From being the form and activation, or
function, of the organism in life, the soul feature of man was given an
appearance in which it could neither be grasped nor understood, nor
shaped, nor guided by man when it got into trouble. From the Middle Ages
there arose an artificial soul and an artificial world of souls
presented as being in eternal conflict with the evil of the flesh--_and
thus the house of human nature was divided against itself_.
Science of the nineteenth century came nearer bringing mind and body
together again. The new astronomical conception of the world and the
growing objective experimental science gradually began to command
confidence, and from being a destroyer of excessively dogmatic notions,
science began to rise to its modern constructive and creative position.
But the problem of _mind_ remained on a wrong basis and still does so
even with most scientists. Too much had been claimed for the psyche, and
because of the singling out of a great world of spirit, the world of
fact had been compromised and left cold and dry and unattractive and
unpromising. No doubt it was necessary that the scientist should become
hardened and weaned from all misleading expectation, and shy of all the
spurious claims of sordid superstition and of childish fancy. He may
have been unduly radical in cutting out everything that in any way
recalled the misleading notions. In the end, we had to go through a
stage of psychology without a "soul," and lately even a psychology
without "consciousness," so that we might be safe from unscientific
pretensions. All the gyrations no doubt tended to retard the wholesome
practical attack upon the problems in the form in which we find them in
our common-sense life.
The first effort at a fresh start tried to explain everything rather
one-sidedly out of the meagre knowledge of the body. Spinoza had said in
his remarkable Ethics (III, Prop. II, Schol.): "Nobody has thus far
determined what the body can do, _i.e._, nobody has as yet shown by
experience and trial what the body can do by the laws of nature alone in
so far as nature is considered merely as corporeal and extended, and
what it cannot do save when determined by mind."
This challenge of Spinoza's had to be met. With some investigators this
seemed very literally all there was to be done about the study of
man--to show how far the body could explain the activity we call "the
mind." The unfortunate feature was that they thought they had to start
with a body not only with mind and soul left out but also with
practical disregard of the whole natural setting. They studied little
more than corpses and experimental animals, and many a critic wondered
how such a corpse or a frog could ever show any mind, normal or
abnormal. To get things balanced again, the vision of man had to expand
to take a sane and practical view of all of human life--not only of its
machinery.
The human organism can never exist without its setting in the world. All
we are and do is of the world and in the world. The great mistake of an
overambitious science has been the desire to study man altogether as a
mere sum of parts, if possible of atoms, or now of electrons, and as a
machine, detached, by itself, because at least some points in the
simpler sciences could be studied to the best advantage with this method
of the so-called elementalist. It was a long time before willingness to
see the large groups of facts, in their broad relations as well as in
their inner structure, finally gave us the concept and vision of
integration which now fits man as a live unit and transformer of energy
into the world of fact and makes him frankly a consciously integrated
psychobiological individual and member of a social group.
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