Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/91

 !;| PSYCHO ANALYSIS AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 345

[^ - . -

•■.■^: influence of the principle of evolution upon the course of scientific

-;•: ■, development.

■^ In that state psychology and clinical psychia:try were not likely

, .-^J. to yield significant results along other than descriptive lines.

? .% KraepeHn, the high light of psychiatry, arranged his text-book

, .;, . . with the conscientious scruples of one who appreciates the scientific

. ;|t; value of classification and description. His clinical entities are

'0y .,... divided, classified and subdivided, tabulated and labelled with

C^ ' much care. Progress between succeeding editions of Kraepelin's text-

,.^' book on Psychiatry consists largely of the introduction of some

Ifi new subdivision or in the transfer from one label to another of

a part of its contents.

The tendency of clinical psychology and psychiatry in its atomistic stage to emphasize description and classification, as illustrated in Kraepelin, is equally obvious in the French school of clinical psychologic research. The Raymond-Janet contributions are masterly descriptions of psychologic states. Janet's works, in par- ticular, read like romances. His studies of hysteria, neuroses, fixed ideas and psychic automatisms have inspired Professor William James to hold out the expectation, in his 'Principles of Psycho*logy', that, 'all these facts, taken together, form unquestionably the be- ginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new light into the very abysses of our nature*.

The new light came as the result of Freud's important discoveries. To the J:wo-dimensional, atomistic, descriptive psychology of the ' French school and of the Kraepelinian psychiatry Freud has added

a third dimension — the genetic, developmental, evolutionistic view- point. The result is as radical a transformation of all branches of psychology as that which Darwin has inaugurated in the biological sciences. Freud's discoveries are doing for' psychology what Darwin's have done for biology.

III

The method of Freud is known as psychoanalysis. It recognizes a selective property whereby ideas group and regroup themselves in accordance with laws governing their emotional value to the person concerned. Freud's psychology lays stress on the emotional, affective value of our ideas rather than on their logical content: