DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C: I conceive Dr. Southard's purpose somewhat differently from Dr. Jelliffe whose thought seems to be somewhat like that of Henry Head when he published his paper in reference to hallucinations, corresponding to various head zones in correspondence with different visceral areas and with special sense organs, eye, ear and so on. I have conceived Dr. Southard as being a direct chemical in line with Folius' pathology researches. If that is the case we have a great many clinical cases which might be underlined with his central thought.
PRESIDENT HALL: It is almost too good to be true if Dr. Southard has really made connections between delusions of personality and the great topic of character. It illustrates the old Hippocratic saw, "God-like is the man who is also a philosopher." Character might almost be called a name for all the mysteries of psychology, and from Mill's ethology and the old phrenologies of temperament that Wundt adopts with slight modifications, we have really made little progress. It seems to me very significant that Dr. Southard should interest himself, as his paper leads one to judge he does, in such problems as Shand's somewhat abstract work, and should seek correlations with legal characterology like that of Roscoe Pound. It would be of great interest to know whether Dr. Southard obtained his differentiations purely from pathological cases or whether, accepting Shand or Pound or both, using their distinctions as apperceptive organs, he unconsciously reads their distinctions into his cases. His paper, at any rate, is a genuine contribution as well as an encouragement to those who seek to correlate the normal with the abnormal.
DR. JAMES J. PUTNAM, Boston: I only want to express my warm sympathy with Dr. Southard's scheme. This careful working out of correlations one would say is a good method of scientific research and must lead to something. I think Dr. Southard would rather avoid the suggestion of CAUSES for the results that he found, but the METHOD appears safe and profitable.
DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York: As another psychoanalyst it gives me pleasure to hear this paper. As a psychoanalyst, and one who has done most of his work with the delusions. of the insane, I must say that I have felt all along that psychoanalysis fails utterly when it tries to account for the manifest content of a delusion. We can trace the psychological stages from the manifest content in varying delusions back to a more or less constant unconscious striving- the latent content. The tendency of this latent content to appear as delusions depends on a defect of adaptation, which must have a physical basis probably of a general nature. The delusions, in many cases, are symbols of the latent content. From a psycho-analytic standpoint, the problem presented in Dr. Southard's paper is "Why is a certain symbol chosen in one case and another in another individual?" It may well be that specific organic factors operate here. One could imagine that the mechanism is purely psychological. In a hepatic condition, for instance, the attention of the patient may be directed to that part of the body which is affected by the pathological process in the liver and that for this reason the ideas which appear refer to generations in that region. At least we may hope for definite and interesting results from elaboration of the method outlined by Dr. Southard's statistics.
DR. SOUTHARD: I am rather astonished and well pleased at the cordial reception of my little statistical work on delusions and upon the elaborate discussion. As to Dr. Hall's question whether my data were collected to prove the a priori contention concerning the correlation of unpleasantness with lesions below the diaphragm, I would say that I expressed a suspicion of this correlation in my paper on "How Far is the Environment Responsible for Delusions," (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, June-July, 1913). I was stimulated to finish my article by the appearance of Shand's book on "The Foundations of Character" and the articles on "Personality" by Prof. Roscoe Pound which have been appearing in the Harvard Law Review.
"Dyslalia Viewed as a Centre Asthenia" was the title of a paper read by Dr.
Walter B. Swift, Boston.[1]
[1] Reserved for Publication.
NO DISCUSSION
DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York, read a joint paper (with DR. W. T. TREADWAY) entitled "Constructive Delusions."[2]
[2] Published in the August-September number, p. 153, of this Journal.
DISCUSSION.
DR. WILLIAM A. WHITE, Washington, D. C., spoke of his interest in the paper and his agreement with it. He suggested that it might be quite proper to use the term "archaic" in speaking of this type of delusions. He also commented on the recurrence of the excitement in the case of the last patient quoted which, he suggested, might represent a physical periodicity as the individual had a homosexual component in his make-up, so that it might be reasonable to suppose that this was fundamentally sex periodicity.
PRESIDENT HALL: Sex periodicity in males is very interesting. A student of mine many years ago kept his own record for some years and published it anonymously in my journal, as did another some ten years ago, and the twenty-eight day cycle seemed very marked in the first and somewhat so in the last of these papers. They are certainly interesting to the geneticist. We now often speak of dreams as protectors of sleep. I am inclined to think that a good many delusions are protectors of sanity in much the same way, and I am not at all sure that we cannot say that we shall ere long see that this is to a great extent true for the imagination. If this patient had a less vivid fancy perhaps his delusions would have been kept less fluid and his sanity would have been better protected. Is there not a relation between floridness of fancy which passes easily over to delusions (just as creative geniuses are allied to artists), but may there not be an inverse correlation between great liveliness and activity of fancy and liability to fixed delusions? At any rate, from the normal standpoint we are seeing more and more that man lives on a genetic scale. This might be illustrated by the many cases, some of them pretty well analyzed, of cat-phobias. The greatest enemies of mankind were once the felidae, and the theory now is that this type is made up of very definite elements, viz., sharp claws, stealthy tread, eyes that shine in the dark, power to leap far and suddenly, a uniquely developed voice, etc. Now the cat-phobiacs generally focus on some one of these traits in consciousness, but analysis seems to show that the rest of them reinforce the one that experience happens to thrust forward into the center of the field of consciousness. In general it seems to me that it is a great educational advantage to keep open the experiences that connect us with the past of the race, and it may have a psychotherapeutic value which we do not now dream. Years ago a New York paper investigated, with the aid of many of its reporters, and found hundreds of people fishing off the wharves of New York on Sunday, very few of whom caught any fish, and many who did threw them back. They were reverting to the old piscatorial stage, feeling again the old thrill of a nibble on the hook, and went home refreshed, even if they had not had a bite, because they had been able to drop back into an ancient stratum of the soul which was sound, so that they came back to the hard reality of the next day refreshed. Play in general, too, we now regard as reversionary, and I cannot but believe that many delusions are precisely the same.
DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C: Dr. Hall has cited the cat-phobia in illustration that the belief that Dr. MacCurdy developed may be one in which there may be philogenetic reasons for the phenomena. It seems to me that before we use such data we need analyses more complete than has been given for any of them. His citation brought to my mind a case I am working with now, a cat-phobia. The cat does not represent sharp eyes and claws. The cat is a definite symbol of definite sexual occurrences in childhood. I should like to ask whether it would be here desired to draw philogenetic conclusions. I think not without the further analysis which would be necessary. I have a very strong distrust of the efforts which Jung and Abrahams have made, followed by some of us, to draw analogy between the morphological changes and the psychological experiences of the race as reproductions in the life history of the individual.
DR. E. E. SOUTHARD: I should be inclined to feel that much of the disturbance in the constructive delusion group would be structurally founded upon normal or abnormal conditions in the parietal lobe. At any rate cases with hyperphantasia in my recent Dementia Praecox series (American Journal of Insanity, 1914-15) appear to be correlated with parietal lobe anomalies and atrophies. It is a curious thing that such subjects with hyperphantastic delusions are very often good institutional workers. Although a delusion of persecution by poison is an exceedingly simple delusion, it is in a sense far more harmful to the organism and may be often far more productive of motor results in a patient than an elaborate psuedo-scientific theory such as constructed by Dr. MacCurdy's patient. It is obvious that the degree of disease does not vary directly with the simplicity of the delusion.
It seems to me that Dr. MacCurdy's work has not only theoretical interest but also practical importance from the standpoint of prognosis.
DR. WALTER B. SWIFT, Boston: I often wonder if we are not a little inclined to go too far back for explanations. In football it is recognized that the men on the field have two sets of reflexes out of which they play under different circumstances. One is a set that they have learned in the lower schools; and the other is the reflex circle that they use after they have been trained differently in college. When these men get tired it is a psychological observation that they go back to those first learned reflex mechanisms. That is, when tired, they play the football of the secondary schools. Something similar occurs in stammering. When a case is trained to have a higher reflex vocalization, and they learn to vocalize spontaneously, it inhibits their stammering. But when they get tired they revert again. In the subject under discussion are we not reaching too far back for sources? Should we not go to infancy or early childhood (to the old reflex circle there) rather than to ones we suppose are inherited?
DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C.: My remarks do not apply to the contents of the delusions, of course, but to the cerebral capacities merely which were susceptible of the formation of such delusions.
DR. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, New York: Dr. MacCurdy's paper fascinated me a great deal. There is so much material that one is in a maze. I am sorry, moreover, that he had to mutilate his conclusions by being forced by lack of time to condense them. It strikes me he gives us a very important contribution to the mechanism of the cure of some psychoses. That mechanism of cure, may be stated as follows: How can one take the split off libido which results from the analytic technique and apply it to a better constructive synthesis? It would seem that these constructive delusions really correspond to interpretative schemes whereby a certain amount of the split off libido becomes synthesized. In that sense these delusions are constructive and are, therefore, helpful to the patient. They represent partial curative processes.
DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York: I would like to refer briefly, first, to the point made by Dr. White to the effect that these ideas were interesting in so far as they were archaic. That is true and it is one of the profoundest truths we have to offer. At the same time it is of psychological and not strictly speaking of psychiatric value. The purpose of my paper was essentially psychiatric, to point out that there is a prognostic value in such delusion as I have tried to outline. Now one can get archaic delusions in patients very much deteriorated. The point of this paper is rather to show, as the discussion brought out, that it is the constructive tendency operating in the insane as it has historically in the race. The second point as to the cycle in his attacks, to follow the inference of Dr. White, I presume he meant to imply that there may have been some organic swing corresponding to the psychotic swing. That of course is quite possible. At the same time the analysis of this case showed that purely psychic factors had a great deal to do with it. His monthly attacks seemed to represent a break in the balance. He was always in unstable equilibrium and the factor that seemed to decide the issue finally between relative sanity and a markedly deteriorated state, was a purely psychological one. When his father died, when he was released from that bondage, the relief seemed just enough to decide the issue. So the organic factors here seem to be the general, underlying inability to adapt himself. One of the hardest situations to adapt himself to was his relations with his father. If he could not free himself he was going to be very insane. When that factor was removed he became relatively insane.
DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C., read a paper entitled, "The origin of Supernatural Explanations."[*]
[*] Published in this number of the Journal, p. 236.
DISCUSSION
DR. E. E. SOUTHARD, Boston: Are all these somatic explanations of metaphysics?
DR. WILLIAMS: Largely.
DR. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, New York: I recall a note in one of Dr. Jones' papers in which he says "that in the future our reason will be used to explain things. Heretofore it has been used to explain them away."
DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C.: I am not prepared to make any predictions about a thousand years from now, that is in the air. I mention not the levels at all, nor do I speak of "decerebrate metaphysics." Nor do I speak of metaphysics at all unless one would imply that what I have called supernatural explanations needs must be metaphysical. I do not speak of cerebral functions per se. I was simply speaking of states of feelings. The source and origin I did not go into. I simply made an attempt to imply that such states of feeling were responsible for the discomfort and feeling of inadequacy of the patient, and as Dr. Jelliffe has well repeated that the victim attempts to rationalize this in supernatural fashion and that this may be not at all dependent upon the notion of the supernatural universe he has imbibed as a child. It is a construing of natural means for getting out of a difficulty.
Dr. L. E. Emerson, Boston, read a paper entitled "The Psycho-Analytic Treatment of Hystero-Epilepsy."[*]
[*] Reserved for publication.
DISCUSSION
DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York: I have been very much interested in this paper by Dr. Emerson and the part that has interested me most in it has been the therapeutic side. I cannot feel, however, that it adds a great deal to our knowledge of epilepsy, that is, of idiopathic epilepsy. That, of course, is a tremendously difficult problem to tackle. If we are to regard it as a psychosis then we expect it to show other reactions, just as dementia praecox shows manic depressive symptoms. If we are to find out what the epileptic reaction is, we must study it in those who are typically epileptic and nothing else. Or else we may examine those with transitional states grading over into hysteria, for example, excluding from our formulations everything in them that is hysteric. This last case which Dr. Emerson brought forward seemed to me to represent what is essentially an hysteric reaction. The convulsive movements this man went through were symbolic. It is difficult to regard these movements in epilepsy as symbolic because in the true epileptic there is as typical unconsciousness as we know. How can anything going on in almost absolute unconsciousness represent something symbolic to the individual? This is possible however, when the condition grades off from the hysteric side into the epileptic. The fundamental epileptic phenomenon is the disturbance of consciousness, and that is what must be explained.
DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C.: I don't know that we can say that the fundamental differentiation of epilepsy is the unconsciousness. That is a psychological division. The paper did not give any differential why they were regarded as epileptics at all. There was no description of the convulsion, except in so far as this formed the hysteric form of convulsion, so I don't think we are in a position to discuss the paper without more clear data of these instances.
DR. WALTER B. SWIFT, Boston: I was interested in hearing about the case of stammering. That will be explained in my own paper and I have also run up against several who have done the same. I should like to ask Dr. Emerson if he considers stammering as an expression of an orgasm.
DR. L. E. EMERSON, Boston: Dr. MacCurdy well remarked that this adds nothing to the understanding of epilepsy. In a certain sense this is true. I do not feel that I could add anything to a deeper understanding of epilepsy. The whole development of psycho-analytic theory, up to a certain point, has been based on the actual recovery of patients, if you do not like the use of the word cure, from particular symptoms. Then this has been generalized. Now that has opened an enormous field for ratiocination. Therefore, I am not at all sure that these conceptions will really apply to essential epilepsies or to the real epilepsies. I do not know how far our conceptions which originate in the therapeutic situation will apply to the situation which appears to be absolutely beyond therapeutics. In regard to what Dr. White said of starting from the known and going through transitional stages to the unknown, you do get insight and it may be that the condition as described in this broad way by Clark and by Stekel and others may be true, but I am not perfectly sure. I am very grateful for Dr. Allen's approval of this way of putting things because perhaps it is a defence reaction on my own part that occasionally I feel it necessary to report things I have seen with my own eyes and really experienced, instead of following my natural tendency to go off into vague philosophizing.
REVIEWS
PSYCHOLOGY IN DAILY LIFE. By Carl Emil Seashore. 1914, XVIII plus 226 pp., N. Y., D. Appleton & Co.
This is the first volume of the "Conduct of Mind" series, the purpose of which, as stated by its editor, Professor Joseph Jastrow, in his introduction to the series, is "to provide readily intelligible surveys of selected aspects of the study of mind and its applications." The present work contains seven chapters, which were originally prepared as "semi-popular addresses." As a consequence, the book lacks somewhat in coherence, but, except in a few places, the emphasis is practical throughout. It is perhaps not surprising that the most subtle and modern part of the discussion, viz. the chapter on "Mental Law" should be the least practical in its bearing.
In the first chapter is discussed the practical importance of "Play," not only in offering the opportunity for sensory, central, and motor development in the child, but for releasing the broader life energies of the adult whose mind is confined by specializing work. It is shown that the fundamental motives of the play life are to be found in religion.
The next three chapters, on "Serviceable Memory," "Mental Efficiency," and "Mental Health," are full of sound practical advice. The first contains a clear and attractive presentation of the principles of remembering, so arranged as to exemplify the rules which it inculcates. The second emphasizes the importance of the wave form of attention in all mental work, the superiority of efferent to afferent response as an educational process, and the acquirement of mastery by a transfer of control from higher to lower mental levels. There is also good counsel with regard to the best time and manner in which to rest, although the author's deductions from the physiological "curve of sleep" appear somewhat hasty. "Mental Health" is defined in terms of our mental "members" in the classical way, and the "Ten Maxims of Wise Living," which are given, are selected from the history of moral philosophy rather than from current psychotherapeutic results.
The chapter on "Mental Law" is the most interesting one for the theoretical psychologist, and discusses in a general but illuminating manner, principles of perception and of perseveration which are of interest to the psychological psychiatrist. The chapter on "Law in Illusion" seems disproportionately long, but gives an interesting description and analysis of three different types of illusions: those based on "units of direction," the over-estimation of "cylinder height," and upon the "size-weight" error. In connection with the second, the results of original investigations in the author's laboratory are presented. It is shown that a knowledge of the complex but definite principles underlying illusions can be made practically serviceable, for example, in tests of mental normality.
The final chapter deals with a specific illustrative problem in "Mental Measurement," viz. the determination of a subject's fitness for a musical career. A detailed analysis of the problem is offered, and it is shown that the elemental questions involved can be answered by the methods of the psychological laboratory, but that these answers require expert interpretation before they can be made practically applicable.
The author's style is engaging and clear. LEONARD THOMPSON TROLAND.
AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHOBIOLOGY. By Knight Dunlap, Associate Professor of Psychology in the Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1914. Pp. 121, octavo; illustrated.
This volume even though brief will be highly appreciated by very many students of normal and of abnormal psychology because it is the first book to afford them just what, in an elementary way, they need concerning the nervous system, the essential musculatures, and the epithelia, whose manifold activities are in some certain mode concomitant to the succession of compound mental events. Surely, and widely, those who a few years ago "came to scoff" at the ever-rising scientific stream of mind-protoplasm relationship will "remain to pray" to the rising and satisfying goddess of the new philosophy. The body with its unimagined intricacies and beauties of still unguessed adaptation and its marvels of Someone's ingenuity is surely now at length coming into its own. And when, after the years, it has come into its own in a reasonable measure, "the continuity of mind-and-energy" and "the dynamic-spiritualism of the Cosmos" when they are mentioned will no longer draw that quasi-withering smile of toleration to the face of the orthodox psychologist with which some of us are familiar.
This volume, happily devised by Professor Dunlap to meet this real need, at first in his own pupils and later in a wider public, will materially help this progress, for it has within it in fairly up-to-date and simple form much of the structure and function, always of surpassing interest when understood, of the human action-system. Seventy-seven excellently clear and well-chosen illustrations make the well-printed text still more informing. There is a good index; and short lists of books at the ends of the chapters.
The present reviewer notes only one omission of substantial importance from the neurologic part of the book, and that is the very recent, howbeit important, matter of the functional opposition between the sympathetic proper and the other, the cranio-sacral, portion of "the autonomic." The work lacks also, in this first edition, a statement and discussion of the important all-or-none principle which is now applicable to voluntary muscle, probably, and to the neurones. And it is to be hoped too that the author will take the bull by the horns and, in the next edition, show the nature of protoplasm in general in an homologous way, as the basis, through its uniquely complex kineticism, of the onward rush of the mental process. With this addition the essential nature of irritability too might be set forth in this already valuable (and inexpensive) treatise. GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN. Sargent Normal School.
PSYCHOLOGY, GENERAL AND APPLIED. Hugo Munsterberg New York and London: D.
Appleton and Co., 1914; Pp. xiv X487 1.75.
In this volume, designed to serve the needs both of the general reader and of the college student, Professor Munsterberg has represented in most readable form the essentials of the entire range of his contributions to psychology. The well-known differentiation of the "two psychologies" is the core of the book; herewith is reintroduced the psychology of the soul, not merely as being on a level with, but ultimately even superordinate to, the descriptive psychology which had banished from so many systems all mention of the soul or even of the self. For we are shown how all description and explanation, whether of material objects or of conscious processes, is after all but construction in the service of purposes, to apprehend, understand, and realize which is the primary business, of life.
This exposition of purposive psychology, surely the most novel feature of the book, is what interests us most, and we discover with disappointment that though theoretically every conscious state is subject-matter for either type of psychology, i.e. may be either described in its causal relationships or immediately grasped as an act of will, still Professor Munsterberg fills five times as many pages with the usual descriptive psychology as with this newer departure. We willingly conceded the importance of tradition in textbook writing, but would urge upon Professor Munsterberg the impatience with which we await more extended treatment of this topic.
A second deviation for a book of this type,-if Professor Munsterberg may rightly be said ever to write books typical of anything but his own uniqueness,-is the inclusion of a section on social psychology. This too, we are inclined to regard as in nature of a promise, representing the germination of lines of thought which we are assured elsewhere[*] are later to receive more elaborate formulation.
[*] Munsterburg, H. "Grundzuge der Psychotechnik." Leipzig, 1914. Vorwort, S. VIII.
Thirdly, one of the main divisions of the book is devoted to applied psychology, the presentation here being essentially an abstract of the author's previous publications in the field of his acknowledged preeminence, psychotechnics.