87

SOCIETIES

International Association for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy.

The second annual meeting of this association was held at Munich on the 25th and 26th of September, 1911, under the presidentship of Dr. Oskar Vogt. There were between thirty and forty members present. A symposium was held on the subject of hypnotism, and a considerable number of individual papers were also read. As before, the discussions were at once translated from one language to another, so that every one could follow the various speakers.

The hypnotism symposium was opened by Bernheim and Claparède, whose communications had for greater convenience been already published in the Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie (Band XVIII). The discussion was divided by the Council under the following headings: 1. Nature of Hypnosis. Specific character of hypnosis; objective evidences of this; relation to simulation and to sleep. II. What modifications of consciousness and of the nervous system characterize hypnosis? Nature of these and relation of them to suggestion; comparison between them and the depth of the hypnosis; psychological features, such as changes in memory, association-reactions, attention, and mental capacity. III. Production of Hypnosis. Frequency with which people can be hypnotized; psychical relation between patient and hypnotizer; mechanism of suggestion. IV. Biological Significance of Hypnosis. Relative antiquity of hypnosis and sleep; occurrence in animals; usefulness in nature. V. Therapeutic Value of Hypnosis. Possible ethical or medical contraindications of hypnotism; relative value of waking and sleeping suggestion; precise indications for and aims of hypnotism. Each of these headings were subdivided, so that a great share of the time had to be spent in deciding whether a given remark belonged to this or that sub-heading. The whole subject was worked over, and several hours spent in discussing the problems in detail. It is hard to say that there was any fruitful result, for not only was there no new point of view brought out in the discussion, but every one seemed at the end to be of the same opinion as when he started. We heard Bernheim give his same intellectualistic definition, Forel maintain that hypnotism. and suggestion was throughout identical and not to be distinguished, Seif state the psycho-analytic view that both suggestion and hypnotism are dependent on the personal relation between the patient and the hypnotizer, and so on. A more sterile discussion surely never took place. The chief, perhaps the only, value of the

symposium was the publication by Claparède of a luminous article (referred to above) which, although it contributes little of positive value, gives an excellent review of the matter and a neat definition of the problems concerned.

Another subject debated at length was that of dreams. Trömner read a paper on this and subdivided the subject for discussion into (a) methods, (b) definition, (c) development, (d) details of dream life, (e) relations between dreams and waking life, (f) causes of dreams. As apparently no one else had any experience to bring forward the debate resolved itself into a duel between Tromner and the psycho-analysts present, which degenerated into a fusillade of repartee.

Frank, in a paper on the determination of neurotic symptoms in the subconscious, proposed an amalgamation of the hypnotic and psycho-analytic methods of treatment. He was supported by Forel, but no one else was willing to listen to any compromise. Of the other papers may be mentioned one by Dupré on hysteria and mythomania, one by Kohnstamm on a psycho-biological theory of consciousness, and one by Delius on the hypnotic treatment of nervous asthma.

The meeting of 1912 will take place in September, at Zurich. Bernheim was elected president, Von Hattenburg, secretary, and Forel, Ernest Jones, Semon, Seif, and Vogt members of the council. The two impressions the present writer received from attending the congress were the lack of novelty in any work done outside the psycho-analytic school, and the difficulty of finding a common ground where matters can be discussed by different schools. ERNEST JONES.

BOOKS RECEIVED

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. By George Malcolm Stratton. George Allen & Company, Ltd., London. 1911, pp. 367. MOTIVE FORCE AND MOTIVATION TRACKS. By E. Boyd Barrett. S. J. Longmans, Green & Company, London. 1911, pp. 225, 7-6 net.

L'ANALYSE PHYSIOLOGIQUE DE LA PERCEPTION. Abramowski. Bloud & Cie. Paris, France. Pp. 120.

Par Edouard

LA SUGGESTION ET SES LIMITES. Par Professeur Bajenoff et D'Ossipoff. Bloud & Cie. Paris, France. Pp. 117.

LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE L'ATTENTION.

Par N. Vaschide et Ray

mond Meunier. Bloud & Cie, Paris, France. Pp. 198.

OBSCENE LITERATURE & CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. By Theodore Schroeder. Privately printed. New York, 1911. Pp. 424.

THE JOURNAL OF

ABNORMAL

PSYCHOLOGY

I

JUNE-JULY, 1912

CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON*

BY FREDERIC LYMAN WELLS, PH.D.,

McLean Hospital, Waverley, Mass.

N our reaction to a broad and distinctive system of

interpreting mental phenomena, one which makes

its appeal strongly on grounds of feeling and a sense

for heuristic values, we must use due care not to forget that the question of its validity is after all a scientific one, which should be dealt with upon rational and not on emotional grounds. There is in the psychological thought of to-day no tendency more subject to this limitation of judgment than the doctrines originating in psychoanalysis. In these brief remarks it is endeavored to point out some special reasons why these doctrines have not had, and in their present form ought scarcely to expect, sympathetic recognition at the hands of a discriminating psychology.

As an interpretation of latent mental trends, the keystone of the psychoanalytic structure is symbolism. Its most important generalizations depend on the correctness of the statement that one mental event is the symbol of a certain other one. The essential evidence upon which the symbolism is formulated seems to be that of some associative connection. Thus if we obey the familiar injunction. to think of Coca-Cola whenever we see an arrow, the arrow might ultimately become in our minds a symbol for CocaCola. But this does not provide that a thing universally

*Substantially as read before a meeting of the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, April 18, 1912.

means what it makes one think of. And if by this criterion one thing symbolizes another now, would this carry with it the assurance that it symbolized, or would have made the subject think of, that other thing at some previous time? Our associative processes are not invariable, but the same idea or external stimulus rouses now one, now an entirely different, set of associations, and the associations of one time are not a criterion of the associations or symbolisms of another. Until it is evident that the method takes some precaution against this quite elementary difficulty, psychology is likely to look askance at its results. It is to be gravely questioned whether the psychoanalytic method is by its very nature capable of demonstrating the things it is claimed to demonstrate, for special example, in its for normal psychology most notable application, the dreamanalysis.

There is no attempt at a sweeping denial of the symbolic factor in dreams; but it seems very improbable that the free association method is of a character to show, retroactively, what these symbolisms truly are. Critical users of the method admit a genuine difficulty in the selection of the precise association from a train of ideas; i. e., of "knowing where to stop." If the dream be a wish-fulfilling mechanism, condensation, displacement, secondary elaboration and dramatization are its four universal joints. Nothing approaching in definiteness and universality the theory of the wish-fulfilling function in dreams is to be built upon evidence of such equivocal character. As Bleuler and doubtless others have clearly seen, the essential question is whether other material, subjected to similar analysis, would not show itself equally symbolic of repressed wishes with the individual's dream. And it is by no means a settled question whether the same symbolic wish-fulfilment is not with similar readiness to be found in material with no direct reference to the subject's personality. Under these circumstances such interpretation of dreams were obviously meaningless; not fifty thousand, but fifty million dreams might be analyzed according to wish-fulfilment.

And in other phases of psychoanalytic doctrine the control procedures are as lacking as they are essential.

We are told that if we forget something we ought to remember, the cause lies in its association with some unpleasant experience. Before such a statement acquires significance, it must be evident that other ideas are not associated with equal closeness to unpleasant experiences. One hesitates to regard this as even improbable, in view of the more than devious character of the associations in some of the classical instances, aliquis, for example. Merely in illustration of the experimental method as applied to the general problem may be mentioned an extensive study of the relation of feeling to memory that of Peters in an recent number of the Psychologische Arbeiten, which contains a just. criticism of the psychoanalytic method in this relation.

Similar interpretations have been sought for lapses in various motor functions. One occasionally meets here with what seems a regrettably naive misconception of the role of the deterministic concept in psychology. Surely every psychologist recognizing a physiological correlate of mental phenomena has considered that all reactions, purposeful or incoherent, are in the strictest sense "determined," and would be the last to dispute that "every little movement has a meaning all its own," even though it were considered that the determining factors lay beyond the reach of reliable investigation. The lapses of speech have been studied the most, psychoanalysis giving attention almost wholly to alterations of the content. This would scarcely give a proportioned view, for the purely formal lapses of speech are also very common, and from a mechanistic standpoint, really more interesting. Studies made with an experimental attitude have long indicated that distraction, or inattention, is an essential factor in one and all. Given distraction, the lapse may be colored by whatever distracts; immediate introspection can best say what this is, but even this not always. It may come from any source; immediate context would seem to be the actually most frequent one, at least in those of handwriting. Those of the typewriter show some interesting peculiarities of their own. The "hidden tendency" does not play a very great part in these studies. Still, the question is not merely whether such factors, as given in the mechanism of