In one of its aspects, as we have seen, the history of medicine is the history of variations—the history of fads pursued and then rejected, of fashions adopted with enthusiasm and then quietly dropped in favor of some more modish style of diagnosis or of treatment. When all these fads and fashions are strictly physiological, the change from one to another can be made without difficulty and without any feeling of mental distress. But where non-physiological factors are involved—factors which cannot be explained in terms of the prevailing medical philosophy—changes of fashion are painful and the resistance to change is stubborn and often violent. Hypnotism involves non-physiological factors; consequently the reality of hypnosis and the value of hypnotic treatment were vehemently denied by the official spokesmen of the medical profession. That the ban upon hypnotism ever came to be lifted was due to a variety of causes. First of all, the metaphysical susceptibilities of the doctors were soothed by the work of Professor Heidenhain. This German researcher was able to convince himself and his colleagues that hypnosis was always the result of strictly physiological causes. It didn’t happen to be true; but, to use the religious phraseology which seems appropriate to the case, it was highly edifying, it brought comfort to the troubled spirit of the doctors, and it helped, incidentally, to make hypnotism respectable. Meanwhile intensive research into the nature of mental illness was being carried on, especially in France and Germany, and the idea of subconscious mental activity gradually forced itself upon even the most physiologically minded psychiatrists. Within the enlarged framework of medical philosophy, hypnosis, though still unexplained, began to make a little more sense. But then—fortunately in some ways, unfortunately in others—the great Doctor Freud made his appearance. Freud banned hypnotism from his system of psychotherapy and, as an entirely illogical consequence of this ban, hypnotism came to be largely neglected in surgery and general medicine, where it is of such inestimable value as a nonpoisonous anesthetic, as a raiser of resistance to infection, as an improver of morale, as a promoter of healing and an accelerator of convalescence.
Wars tend to stimulate medical advance, at any rate in those countries which have escaped severe devastation. The current revival of interest in hypnotism is in part due to its successful employment in military hospitals. Medicine has now returned to the position once occupied by Esdaile and Elliotson. That it should have taken four generations to reconquer that position is certainly unfortunate. But better late than never.
(From Esquire Magazine)
The Oddest Science
The reading of yet another book about modern psychological theories is always, I find, a rather exasperating experience. Clothed in an ugly and hardly comprehensible jargon, the obvious is portentously enunciated, as though it were some kind of esoteric mystery. The immemorially ancient is presented, with fanfares, as a brand-new, epoch-making discovery. Instead of open-mindedness, we find dogmatism; instead of comprehensive views, we are given theories which ignore whole provinces of given reality, whole categories of the most significant kinds of facts. And instead of the concreteness so essential in a science of observation, instead of the principle of multiple causation which must govern all thinking about so complex a creature as man, we are treated to shameless displays of those gravest of intellectual sins, overabstraction, overgeneralization and oversimplification.
All this does not mean, of course, that treatises about modern psychological theories should not be read. These treatises are conspicuous facts in the life of our time and, as such, they must not be ignored. Besides, it goes without saying that, in spite of all their defects, the formulators of modern psychological theories have made substantial contributions to the sum of practical wisdom and have done something to deepen our understanding of human nature.
As a history of modern psychology in terms of “an integrative evaluation of Freud, Adler, Jung and Rank,” Doctor Ira Progoff’s recent book, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, is clear and illuminating. So clear, indeed, and so illuminating that not only the virtues of modern psychology’s founding fathers, but also their shortcomings stand out, in its pages, with glaring distinctness.
Let us begin with what is, I suppose, the most serious, as it is certainly the most conspicuous, shortcoming of them all—the absence from all these theories (with the partial exception of Adler’s) of any mention of the body as a conditioning factor in the formation of a personality, or as a determinant of thoughts, feelings and behavior. Adler, it is true, made a number of penetrating remarks on the consequences of a sense of organic inferiority; but even Adler was very far from giving the body its due as a shaper of individual character and destiny. Freud, Jung and Rank seem to have imagined that they could understand human minds without taking into account the bodies with which those minds are indissolubly associated. Their one-sidedness is the mirror-image of the one-sidedness of the exclusively physiological physician. But just as it is perfectly clear that bodies cannot be understood or successfully treated without reference to their minds, so too it is perfectly clear that minds cannot be understood or successfully treated without reference to their bodies. Doctors are at last reconciling themselves to the idea of psychosomatic medicine. It is time for psychologists to reconcile themselves to the complementary notion of a somato-psychic approach to the problems of mind and character.
It was not only by psychology’s founding fathers that the body was neglected. The same absurd one-sidedness was and still is observable in most of their successors. How rarely, in recent books on psychology, do we come upon a passage like the following from Doctor Erich Fromm’s work on dreams, The Forgotten Language. Commenting on the words of an ancient Hindu writer, Dr. Fromm remarks that “he points to a significant connection between temperament (i.e., those psychic qualities which are rooted in a constitutionally given somatic basis) and dream content”—a connection “which has found hardly any attention in contemporary dream interpretation, although it is a significant factor in dream interpretation, as further research will undoubtedly show.” After which Dr. Fromm passes on to other, one-sidedly psychological considerations. Let us hope that this passing reference to the significance of temperament may serve as an opening wedge to a new somato-psychic approach, not merely to dreaming, but to all mental activities. It will not be difficult to make such an approach; for all the really hard preparatory work has already been done by Doctor William Sheldon and his colleagues. Using Sheldon’s rigorous and powerful methods, it is now possible for any psychologist or psychiatrist to make an accurate assessment of the “constitutionally given somatic basis,” in which our “psychic qualities” are rooted. But though the means are available, they are hardly ever used, and psychologists continue to treat minds without reference to bodies, and to publish what they are pleased to call “case histories” without deigning to give the slightest indication of what sort of people, somatically speaking, their patients were. How much did Mrs. X weigh—ninety pounds or two hundred? Did Mr. Y have the physique of an ox or a daddy longlegs, of a panther or a jellyfish? To these questions most psychologists never vouchsafe an answer—presumably because, unlike the rest of mankind, they have never thought of asking them. In his monumental Atlas of Men, Dr. Sheldon has published several thousands of photographs showing the continuous variation of masculine physique, and assessing those variations within a frame of reference having three coordinates, endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. Turning over the pages of this book, one sees at a glance that it is obviously impossible for creatures so unlike one another as men at the extreme limits of possible variation to feel, think and behave in the same way. This is something which every one of normal intelligence has known for the last two or three hundred thousand years. It has remained for modern psychologists to ignore this self-evident fact and to talk, in their vague, rhetorical way, about “Man,” “Modern Man,” or even “Man in the Era of Sexuality,” as though there were standardized objects corresponding to these words. But in fact, of course, nobody has ever encountered these mythical beings. Nobody has ever encountered anyone but Tom, Dick and Harry, Dolly, Molly and Polly. But, as everybody knows perfectly well, Tom is congenitally unlike Dick, and Harry is constitutionally different from both of the others. And the same is true of Dolly, Molly and Polly. They are profoundly different one from another, and many of their differences are built in, or (as Dr. Fromm would say), “rooted in a constitutionally given somatic basis.” Why, one wonders, do the men and women whose profession it is to understand and treat people’s minds neglect to study these constitutionally determined differences between individuals? Such voluntary ignorance can be accounted for, I suppose, partly by the force of inertia and ingrained habit; the one-sided approach is traditional, time-hallowed, sanctioned by the bad example of the founding fathers. Nor must we forget that it is a great deal easier to be one-sided than to think and act realistically in terms of multiple causation. Wherever the line of least resistance can be followed, it generally is followed.