PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching generality for the understanding of human life:  that character and conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to react as a whole, as consciousness.  The result of such a reaction as a whole tends to balance the disturbance of energy, so as to maintain or restore the equilibrium, or sense of harmony and comfort, when consciousness again disappears.  This law is an attempt at synthesis of the labors of the psychanalysts, the behaviourists, and the students of the internal secretions (Freud, Jung, Adler, Sherrington, Watson, Von Bechterew, Kempf, Crile, Cannon, Cushing, Fraenkel are the great names of the movement).  Most of the details, and all of the quantitative applications of the law still remain to be worked out.  But a statement like the following of Cushing, the eminent surgeon-student of the endocrines, that “it is quite probable that the psychopathology of everyday life hinges largely upon the effect of ductless gland discharges upon the nervous system,” shows which way the wind is blowing.

In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure when he fails.  In the first place, he deals with psychic results as processes, and ignores the physiology of their production.  Since a true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious.  In the second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and flourish.  That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations within the vegetative apparatus.  And as we can often attack that soil more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate.  The concept of the endocrine-vegetative apparatus as the determinant of normal and abnormal behaviour, emotional reactions and disturbances of power should in time cause even the most fanatic of the psychanalysts to recognize the functional basis of the mental acrostics they are so fond of dissecting.

NATURAL ABILITY