Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/183

Rh free association experiment, the technique of the "psychogalvanic" reflex, or some allied method, the properties of the work-curve and a few of the less equivocal methods for determining it, and the better developed forms of memory experimentation. Nor should I question the inclusion of the Binet-Simon tests, though without personal experience with them. It would lead too far afield to explain just why these particular experimental methods have been spoken of and not others, but suffice it to express every assurance that they are among the methods most helpful to the better understanding of those cases with which psychiatric clinics are replete. It is true that such division would form practically separate units in the course, and they could be taken up in any desirable order, save that, e. g., certain phases of the association experiment and the "psychogalvanic" reflex are best considered together. Whether the content of a laboratory course were as above or something totally different, it must be governed essentially by its medical usefulness, and those features included which best justify themselves in this light. How much time can be given, and when, depends of course on administrative factors; all the time that Watson suggests could be profitably used, and it should be so ordered as to be convenient for those who take up the special work given in mental diseases.

Such, in principle, is the writer's conception of a laboratory course likely to be of most value to students of medicine, nor would it be claimed that its subject matter could be effectively dealt with under other than laboratory conditions. There yet remains that considerable body of psychological problems whose concern with medicine is not less immediate than those above, but whose relation to experimental, or indeed in any way objective, methods, is at present very indefinite. They are essentially problems of psychogenesis—the development of the various mental reactions and tendencies of which individual character and temperament are built up. It is readily discernible that a growing emphasis is laid in psychopathology upon the determining if not conditioning rôle of psychogenic factors in a variety of conditions, ranging from hysteria to the manic-depressive group; though the scientific development of methods, or their application to the study of normal mental reaction types, has been largely conspicuous in absence.

It is this phase of the situation that looms largest in Meyer's vision, with especial regard to its problems. The point of view goes back to some basal concepts of "mental reaction" and the remarks represented a none the less forceful, if indirect, criticism of the conventional Fragestellung in its relation to the problems on the pathological side. While at various times psychological writers have deprecated the tendencies inherent, from a scientific standpoint, in many doctrines