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Page 7
It is natural enough that man should want to travel on the road he knows
and likes best. The philosopher uses his logic and analysis and
synthesis. The introspectionist wants to get at the riddle of the
universe by crawling into the innermost depth of his own self-scrutiny,
even at the risk--to use a homely phrase--of drawing the hole in after
him and losing all connection with the objective world. The physicist
follows the reverse course. He gives us the appreciation of the
objective world around and in us. The chemist follows out the analytic
and synthetic possibilities of his atoms and elements, and the biologist
the growth and reproduction and multiplication of cells. Each sees an
open world of possibilities and is ready to follow as far as facts will
carry and as far as the imagination will soar. Each branch has created
its rules of the game culminating in the concept of objective science,
and the last set of facts to bring itself under the rules of objective
science, and to be accepted, has been man as a unit and personality.
The mind and soul of man have indeed had a hard time. To this day,
investigators have suffered under the dogma that mind must be treated as
purely subjective entity, something that can be studied only by
introspection, or at least only with ultra-accurate instruments--always
with the idea that common sense is all wrong in its psychology.
Undoubtedly it was, so long as it spoke of a mind and soul as if what
was called so had to be, even during life, mysterious and inaccessible,
something quite different from any other fact of natural-history study.
The great step was taken when all of life was seen again in its broad
relations, without any special theory but frankly as common sense finds
it, viz., as the activities and behavior of definite individuals--very
much as Aristotle had put it--"living organisms in their 'form' or
activity and behavior." Psychology had to wake up to studying other
minds as well as one's own. Common sense has always been willing to
study other persons besides our own selves, and that exactly as we study
single organs--viz., for what they are and do and for the conditions of
success and failure. Nor do we have to start necessarily from so-called
elements. Progress cannot be made merely out of details. It will not do
merely to pile up fragments and to expect the aggregates to form
themselves. It also takes a friend of facts with the capacity for
mustering and unifying them, as the general musters his army. Biology
had to have evolutionists and its Darwin to get on a broad basis to
start with, and human biology, the life of man, similarly had to be
conceived in a new spirit, with a clear recognition of the opportunities
for the study of detail about the brain and about the conditions for
its working and its proper support, but also with a clear vision of the
whole man and all that his happiness and efficiency depend upon.
All this evolution is strongly reflected in the actual work of
psychiatry and medicine. For a time, it looked to the physician as if
the physiology and pathology of the body had to make it their ambition
to make wholly unnecessary what traditional psychology had accumulated,
by turning it all into brain physiology. The "psychological" facts
involved were undoubtedly more difficult to control, so much so that one
tried to cut them out altogether. As if foreshadowing the later academic
"psychology without soul and consciousness," the venerable
Superintendent of Utica, Dr. Gray, was very proud when in 1870 he had
eliminated the "mental and moral causes" from his statistics of the
Utica State Hospital, hiding behind the dogma that "mind cannot become
diseased, but only the body." To-day "mental and moral causes" are
recognized again in truer form--no longer as mere ideas and
uninvestigated suppositions taken from uncritical histories, but as
concrete and critically studied life situations and life factors and
life problems. Our patients are not sick merely in an abstract mind, but
by actually living in ways which put their mind and the entire organism
and its activity in jeopardy, and we are now free to see how this
happens--since we study the biography and life history, the resources of
adaptation and of shaping the life to success or to failure.
The study of life problems always concerns itself with the interaction
of an individual organism with life situations. The first result of a
recognition of this fact was a more whole-hearted and practical concept
of personality.
In 1903 I put together for the first time my analysis of the neurotic
personality, which was soon followed by a series of studies on the
influences of the mental factors, and in 1908 a paper on "What Do
Histories of Cases of Insanity Teach Us Concerning Preventive Mental
Hygiene During the Years of School Life?" All this was using for
psychiatry the growing appreciation of a broad biological view-point in
its concrete application. It was a reaction against the peculiar fear of
studying the facts of life simply and directly as we find and experience
them--scoffed at because it looked as if one was not dealing with
dependable and effective data. Many of the factors mentioned as causes
do not have the claimed effects with sufficient regularity. It is quite
true that not everybody is liable to any serious upset by several of the
handicaps sometimes found to be disastrous during the years of
development; but we have learned to see more clearly why the one person
does and the other does not suffer. Evidently, not everybody who is
reserved and retiring need be in danger of mental disorder, yet there
are persons of just this type of make-up that are less able than others
to stand the strains of isolation, of inferiority feeling, of exalted
ambitions and one-sided longings, intolerable desires, etc. The same
individual difference of susceptibility holds even for alcohol. With
this recognition we came to lay stress again on the specific factors
which make for the deterioration of habits, for tantrums with
imaginations, and for drifting into abnormal behavior, and conditions
incompatible with health.
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