A Psychiatric Milestone | Page 7

and member of a social group.
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