Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/55

 NORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 211

what he considers to be the exaggerated significance attached by Freud to sexual and infantile factors.

After consideration of these views of a friendly exponent of psycho-analysis, we may turn with interest to hear the words of an opponent, W. Stem (31, 32). Stern's system of 'Critical Per- sonalism' starts from the cosmic antithesis of 'Person' and 'Thing'. By 'Person' he understands "an entity of such a kind that, in spite of its diversity of parts, it constitutes a whole possessing a nature and value peculiar to itself, and that despite its diversity of partial- functions possesses a co-ordinated and purposeful activity as a whole". The psychic is to be met in a portion of human personal- ity only; this personality manifesting itself for the most part in a neutral territory, psycho-physical in nature. Both in the psychical and the physical it is possible to distinguish four divisions. The divisions of the former are: (1) psychical phenomena, (2) uncon- scious (or more correctly, super-conscious) acts, (3) tJie corre- sponding dispositions, (4) the Self. In the region of the physical Stern distingui.shes : (1) physical phenomena, (2) tendencies towards a definite goal, (3) dispositions, (4) the organism.

The Organism and the Self meet as (neutral) psycho-physical realities in the comprehensive concept of the 'Real Personality'. There exist both a real and an ideal personality. The former actually appears in our experience and exhibits the pheno- mena of 'Convergence' i. e. the conjunction of inner and outer factors in the process of adaptation to reality. The ideal person- ality exists only as an imaginary construction; it, possesses no consciousness, since consciousness is a product of a process of Convergence connected with a conflict. Conflicts arise when novel situations are encountered, when different interests make incom- patible demands upon behaviour, and as the result of a struggle between the time factors — present, past and future.

Consciousness itself only gives a distorted impression of objects. It is especially in this connection that reference is made to psycho- analysis, 'which displaces the true essence of personality to the Unconscious and ascribes a symbolic value only to the Conscious '. In order to understand conscious experience, we must, says Stern, realise its symbolic relations to the aims of the personality. Con- scious motivations are misleading; the process of Convergence brings about an 'Introception' of aims, as a result of which we meet with falsifying factors even in a ' self-consciousness that is in accordance