Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/584

580 depend on the way in which this complex enables the individual to make appropriate reactions to his environment. An individual becomes psychotic when he fails to behave with a certain more or less arbitrary degree of appropriateness. Where the mental malfunctioning follows a sufficiently definite line, we may formulate a definite psychotic entity, as the manic-depressive or the hysterical states. The experimental side of the dynamic psychopathology is therefore distinct from the academic psychology in that it is essentially grounded in the measurement of the reaction's adequacy or fitness. It involves a fundamental recasting of psychological methods, more along the lines of comparative psychology, whose details have only begun to be worked out.

These things shall enable us to observe certain mechanisms of adaptation, from which we must learn about the individual's fundamental adaptability. There are very few adaptations which every individual must make, but life places very many persons in situations which they can not meet. Some can not meet them within themselves; they react with the "flight into the psychosis." Some can not meet them as members of society; they react along criminal lines. Others can do neither, and they have led us into the absurdness of a dividing line of responsibility for action where not the shadow of a line exists. We have seen how continuous all normal human traits are with the pathological. The value of all attempts at controlling the actions of men, as with automobiles or waterfalls, depends upon taking account of the mechanical principles upon which they act. A chief legislator of my native state lately remarked, "Men do not make laws, they discover them." The problems of the jurist, even more than those of the psychiatrist, are failures of mental adaptation; and as we discover its laws we shall discover the best laws to regulate human conduct for both the happiness of the individual and the order of society.