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(Article Originally Published in The Psychological Bulletin 1906)
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Any unsophisticated student and observer who has followed the literature on paranoiaduring the last ten years, has had some reason to wonder why such emphasis was puton the question whether paranoia was fundamentally an intellectual or an emotionaldisorder. I never could see much use in the discussion except insofar as it illustratedthe doubtful definition of the distinction of emotion and intellectual function as soonas one left the most striking examples of the one type and the other and got into azone of mixed and doubtful conditions. It is easy to see that it is wise and inevitable toemphasize the emotional nature of a fright and the merely intellectual nature of mypresent use of the word fright, or the intellectual nature of the sensation of a red lineand the emotional feature of the reaction to a flash of lightning. But in many mentalhappenings the two belong together in a way that makes a ripping apart, or evenemphasis of the one or the other, unprofitable and dogmatic. A study of paranoia byBleuler, with a reply by Berze, and a review on obsessions by Bumke, furnish materialfor a ventilation of the possible reasons for the perennial dispute and for an admissionof heresy.Broadly speaking, almost every mental activity allows us to recognize relations to twofundamental systems, that of the shaping of the personal physio-psychological('emotional') attitudes of our circulatory, respiratory and vegetative side, and that of the more fleeting and more impersonal neuro-muscular ('intellectual') relations, basedon the sense organs per se and the muscular apparatus carrying and directing them.Or, to speak in other terms, almost every mental activity implies an adjustment of theemotional attitude (that balance which is attended to largely by the sympatheticnervous mechanisms and their central connections), and an adjustment within theintellectual system (the apparatus of sensations and ideational relations). The movingentities or 'idées-forces' are, however, compounds, which we must have the courageto use as units for what they are worth without allowing ourselves to be distracted byendless quibbling over the nature of components and their real functional relations.We must learn to work again with complexes and provisional biological entities insteadof assuming merely arithmetical relations between postulated fragments of thesituations. There are some important relations about which we cannot afford to havefinally settled ideas, and among these stands foremost the relation of the emotional
 
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and the intellectual aspects of mental activities. By dealing modestly with situations asthey present themselves and for what they are worth, we can use them in our workand draw just as valid inferences and we may hope to keep nearer the fundamentalscience, biology, and its utilization.We frequently hear of patients awakening with a feeling of indefinite anxiety orsadness or nervousness which we cannot class otherwise than as emotional states,while at other times these same patients attach their emotional attitudes to specialevents, or to anticipations of definite events: the thought of the death of a friend, orthe thought of ill-will or persecution from another person, or the memory of aperfectly irrelevant fact of absolutely insufficient bearing, as in the case of a womanwho fretted over having disgraced herself and her family by exposing a slightly soiledpetticoat in getting into a buggy, or some other plainly incidental food for herfundamental uneasiness and agitated despair. Or we hear a patient complain of theannoyance of hearing an imaginary orchestra play and occupy his attention, so as todrive him to distraction. Here the fundamental fact is his uncontrollable musicalimagination with the vividness and independence of a hypnagogic hallucination, andthe distress is largely present owing to collision of the musical drift with the ordinaryand more important and pressing interests of the person. But there are manyinstances where the predominance of the emotional trend or of the intellectual side isfar less conspicuous and more variable and the whole event none the less plainly avital factor in the determination of the patient's conduct and trend of mentation. Inpractice we weigh the emotional factor and the purely intellectual one of suchconstellations as jealousy, or anxiety, or uneasiness, without, however, assuming thatthere would be any advantage in pushing the analysis so far as to have one mass of pure emotion and one mass of pure intellectual processes.Emotional and intellectual determinants are frequently worth weighing independentlyfor their different bearing as well as for the fact that different parts of our organismare involved. Yet empirically we deal with the situation as with a compound whichloses its essential traits by decomposition, and we must be ready to deal with suchcompounds for what they are worth and likely to mean in the stream of eventswithout distracting ourselves over temporarily irrelevant questions. When we have to
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