Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/184

180 with the name of psychoanalysis, it would be difficult to deny that the responsibility for psychoanalysis rests to some extent with the psychologists ourselves. The neurologist found himself confronted with certain problems psychological in their nature, with which the academic psychology had largely thought best not to concern itself. It is true that we have an "individual" psychology; one of the differences in simple reaction time, in color vision, or in memory for nonsense syllables, various elementary traits among which it has been difficult to establish relationships or other than superficial interpretation. From a medical standpoint it is better to give up this Problemstellung of individual differences in functions, for one, so to speak, of individual differences in individuals. The medical requirement is rather for a psychology that shall seek the correlation of objective methods for studying the personality with the mental reactions of that personality in the greater laboratory of mundane experience. The key-word to what medical psychology should be, and what academic psychology has not been, is, in fact, "personality." To our conventional chapter-headings of imagination, will, habit, experience and the like, let us mentally add the words as they affect the personality, if we wish to reach the standpoint of the greatest help in the medical relation. We shall study the mental evolution of the individual, rather than the genetic psychology of different mental faculties. Our psychology will be one of conduct, reactions, adjustments. As such we shall pay greater heed to feeling as a disturber of these adjustments. We shall start from the standpoint of the "mind as an adaptive mechanism"; the personality as a sum of various tendencies in mental adaption or reaction-type. We shall study the various mental means through which different personalities react upon, or adjust themselves to, the vital situations they meet. We shall learn how some personalities react in ways that involve mental good, others in ways that involve mental harm, and we shall inquire into the modifiability of these reaction types, with the view to their possible amelioration.

Though having a somewhat different outlook upon the matter, and expressing it in different terms, it appears that the things which Prince finds to criticize in the pathological relations of the academic psychology are essentially the same.