Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/95

 PSYCHO ANALYSIS AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 349

sembling one after another various organisms from the simpler to the more complex and at birth still resembles man’s immediate anthropoid pregenitor more than the human race.

This is not the place to mention the numerous limitations and strictures that have been placed upon this ingenious theory as originally worked out by Haeckel and his enthusiastic pupils. It is true that some phases of intra-uterine existence appear to corre- spond to a higher phyletic branch than the immediately following ones, as if in repeating the story of the biologic unfoldment of the human race, the embryo rushed ahead a period or two and returned to the omitted sections subsequently, exactly as one often does when telling an interesting story. This and other minor con- siderations in no way detract from the significance of the theory as a whole any more than rushing from one crucial point to another in the telling of a story and then returning to dwell on details, makes the story untrue. The facts are sufficient in their essentials to prove the recapitulation theory is sound.

IV

Now, turning our attention to the individual mind, may not that, too, similarly recapitulate in the course of its growth the psychic unfoldment of the human race? That our mind does that very thing has long been a theoretic conclusion of biological in- vestigators.

Unfortunately, psychologists had discovered no way to lift that capital idea from the realm of hypothesis and transmute it into a working, useful, practical principle. Neither the technique of ordinary laboratory psychology nor that of clinical psychiatry was such as to enable students of mind to make use of this fund- amental truth in their work. Both psychology and psychiatry remained as before Darwin, atomistic, loosely dynamistic, descrip- tive. Whole textbooks on psychology have been written without the term ‘development’ becoming once necessary in the descrip- tion of mental processes. At this stage in the history of science that in itself should have warned the old school psychologists and psychiatrists that something was the matter with the technique of their disciplines.


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