DR. JOHN T. MAC CURDY, New York City: I have been so interested in the
paper by Dr. Hall that I have been distinctly delighted by it and with your
permission I will refer to a point in Dr. Putnam's paper directly pertinent
to the issues raised by Dr. Hall. Dr. Putnam has spoken of the necessity
for metaphysics by which I presume he means the necessity for formulation.
Yesterday there was some antagonism in a discussion on formulation. We
cannot avoid formulating. Our advance in knowledge is purely empiric unless
it is directly dependent on formulation. We have not formulated enough. We
have stuck too much to our empiric data, have not made the necessary
deductions from it. What formulations there are have been based on
therapeutic data and explain the productions of symptoms. No attention has
been paid to the general psychoneurotic or psychotic Anlage. When this is
done I am sure that it will be found that there are just such primordial
reactions as President Hall has been talking about lying back of all the
sexual impulses. Sexual reactions have in the course of development come to
be the vehicle for more primitive ones. We know by observation that the
infant demonstrates anger in a much greater degree, and long before he gives
evidence of things sexual, in anything approaching the adult sense of that
term. The temporary formulation of psychoanalysts who attempt to explain
anger or temper by sadism are really ridiculous. President Hall rightly says
that sadism must be explained by anger. That is one of the primitive
emotions. Sex is merely a vehicle. The importance of this transference is
that the sex emotions are peculiarly adapted to repression and when once
unconscious, continue to operate all through the life of the individual.
This is less likely to occur in the sudden reaction of anger, which is much
more apt to be blown off at the time.
DR. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, New York, N. Y: I cannot quote the line, but in
Shaw's "Doctor's Dilemma," recently presented in New York, there is an
exchange of words during which the heroine tells the surgeon that she is
tempted to pass from loving him to hating him. He replied that one is
surprised after all what an amazing little difference there is between the
two different attitudes of mind. Dr. Jelliffe said he was quite in sympathy
with what Dr. MacCurdy had been saying, with reference to the need for
formulation: We all know how these formulations have grown and how they are
utilized practically. For instance, we formulate an attitude towards space.
We wish to handle space and say 3 ft. or 7 ft. in order to handle space
relations. In other words, to handle space we utilize a formulation which
we call a measure of space. In the same manner in order to handle time we
make a hypothetical unit to be pragmatic. In handling the phenomena of
electricity, we formulate other units. In my own mind there has grown up
therefore the analogy that in order to handle psychological phenomena we
have formulated the Oedipus by hypothesis. This hypothesis I would define as
the unconscious biological directing of the energy of the child towards the
parent of the opposite sex and away from that of the same sex. This is the
unconscious basis of what in consciousness we call love and hate. The boy
is unconsciously directed away from the parent of the same sex. He develops
according to the Oedipus hypothesis the desire to get away from the father
or the father image. All other men are patterned after the father image and
if this strong biological direction fails to take place, his interest not
being directed in an opposite direction, he fails to mate and thus fails in
his reproductive function. The reproductive function cannot go on without
this biological thrust towards the proper object. By Narcissism is meant the
formulation that a new development is taking place in the infantile Oedipus
fantasy. The child cannot hold on to the mother image. He passes it to
others nearer his own age. He does it first through his own identification
with the female. His bisexuality permits this. Similarly the infantile
father protest must be supplanted by an evolved brotherly love. The
competition with the father image must take a new form. It must be a mutual
competition with mutual productivity. Any contact between man and man that
does not ensue to the value of both in some degree, therefore, registers a
failure to sublimate the unconscious gather hatred of the infantile stage of
development. Sublimated hatred of the father image is brotherly love.
Sublimated love of the mother image is taking one's place in the world as a
father for the continuance of the race. In the unconscious the formula of
direction against same sex and towards opposite sex, means therefore that in
the unconscious love and hate are the same; one cannot give them these names
however.
Thus I would enlarge the Oedipus formula and say that it is useful not only
in understanding the neurotic, but it can be used to measure up all
psychological situations.
DR. JAMES J. PUTNAM, Boston: I deeply appreciated and enjoyed what Dr. Hall
said and I have no question whatever that we all who are so interested in
psychological work profit by arguments of this sort being brought before our
notice. I think it is an unfortunate thing that Adler, who was on that line
and did such good work in it, coupled his statements with a sort of
denunciation of Freud's views. It seems to me to have been entirely
unnecessary. One of the remarkable stories of O. Henry, who was a keen
observer of human nature, deals with a frontier army officer who exposed
continually himself to danger, desiring to work out in an indirect way this
feeling of conquering one person by another, only it was himself, his own
cowardice, that he wished eventually to conquer. I would ask Dr. Hall if
the notion of which Royce has made so much, namely, the social concept, is
not one which perhaps would act as the common denominator in these cases. We
cannot assert ourselves and get angry without virtually having reference to
other persons, neither can we have sex feelings without such reference. It
seems that the social instinct or imagination which is carried around by
every individual and which determines his acts is as natural and as
invariably present as the existence of a desire to live, not to speak of the
desire to conquer.
DR. MORTON PRINCE, Boston: I feel extremely thankful to Dr. Hall for his
very interesting and satisfying presentation of the thesis which he has
given us. I remember an old gentleman once saying to me, in speaking of
another man with whom he had been conversing, "He is a very intelligent man.
He thinks just as I do." So I think Dr. Hall is a very intelligent man; he
thinks just as I do. I am entirely in accord with his views which he has so
well expressed. What he has said is in principle the basis of the paper
which I intended to present this morning but which, in view of the length of
our programme, I have decided to withdraw.
The principle underlying the large number of concrete facts which he has
given is that besides the sexual instinct there are a large number of other
instincts--one of which is anger--which have a very important place and play
important parts in personality. Some of these instincts play not only as
important a part as the sexual instinct but even a more important part.
And, as Dr. Hall has said, the Freudian mechanisms can be applied to them
just as well and just as logically. If an analysis is fully carried out
along the directions of these instincts we find, according to my
observations, the same disturbances that we find from conflicts with the
sexual instinct and effected by the same mechanisms. Amongst these instincts
besides anger there is the parental instinct, containing, if we follow Mr.
McDougall's terminology, tender feeling or love. At any rate love is an
instinct entirely distinct from the sexual instinct. There are also the
instinct of self-assertion and, fully as important as any, that of
self-abasement. This last, according to my observations and interpretations
plays a very important part in many cases of psycho-neurosis and leads
through conflicts to the same disturbances of personality that one finds
brought about by conflicts between the other instincts. That love may be
something entirely separate and distinct from the sexual instinct is a view
which is generally recognized and accepted by psychological writers but
entirely ignored, as a rule, by Freudian writers. A criticism which I would
make of the work of the Freudians is that while they recognize these
instincts they do not give them their full value nor study them as
completely and thoroughly--nor do they carry their studies to the final
logical conclusion--as they do with the sexual instinct. So far as they may
do so they subordinate these instinctive emotions entirely to the sexual
instinct so that these latter simply make use of them. When the
psycho-neuroses are completely studied we will find the same repression of
the various instinctive dispositions and impulses to which I have referred
in the one case as in the other, and of ideas organized with these
disposition. We find the same conflicts and resulting disturbances. The
sexual instinct has no hegemony. To my mind each occupies precisely the
same position and may play the same part in personality.
When you bear in mind that psychologically it is a fact, as I believe, that
sentiments are formed by the organization of emotional instincts with ideas,
with the memories of experiences, as Shand has pointed out, and when you
remember that it is through the force of emotional instincts thus organized
that an idea, i e., a sentiment, acquires its driving force which tends to
carry the idea to fulfilment, and when you bear in mind that sentiments thus
formed are derived from antecedent experiences sometimes dating back to
childhood and sometimes persisting through life, we can understand how
conflicts arise between antagonistic sentiments and the part which the
different instincts, through the force of their impulses, play in these
conflicts.
Furthermore when we bear in mind that sentiments thus originating and
organized are conserved in the subconscious forming what I call the
"setting" which gives idea meaning, the meaning being the most important
component of any idea, and when we bear in mind that this subconscious
setting is an integral part of the total mechanism of thought--each
sentiment in the setting striving to carry itself to completion, and for
this purpose repressing every conflicting sentiment--I think we find a
satisfactory explanation of the disturbances due to conflict in the
psycho-neuroses. Such a mechanism gives full value to any one and all of the
emotional instincts without giving primacy to any one.
DR. WALTER B. SWIFT, Boston: In regard to the origin of emotions: I
understood Dr. Hall to say that they were not instinct. Of late I have been
observing two young children develop certain emotions. The starting point of
that development has seemed to be in the imitation of motions seen in
others. It is plain to see that this is along the line of the James-Lange
hypothesis. So that before these motions were seen there was no emotion in
the child. If these motions were observed and imitated by the children then
the emotions developed. I would, therefore, like to ask President Hall
whether he would consider imitation of motion seen in another as the
starting point of the development of emotion.
DR. TOM WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C.: The value of formulation we know. It
has been well illustrated by Dr. Hall's paper that he has by definite
concept followed out by investigation of this. The disadvantage of
formulation is very well shown by over-formulation by the scholastics in the
Middle Ages. I think Dr. Hall's wonderful contribution to our psychological
researches should be kept in mind by those who have excessively formulated
in a certain direction in order that some of us at least may apply to some
of the other emotions what others have attempted concerning libido. Dr.
Prince has long appealed for other methods than those which have been
applied so exclusively to the sexuality. In reference to the manifestation
of the anger trend, for instance, it may be not only a definitely conscious
manifestation, but it may perhaps produce a crisis even in dream-thought. I
am speaking of a case. A young boy at boarding school who was a musical
genius had been very much bullied. He suffered a great deal from this, but
did not retaliate until one night in the dormitory with eight boys while
asleep, he being badgered by neighbors, got up while asleep and attacked
these larger boys and discomfited them. It was the subject of conversation
in the dormitory, whether he was really asleep or not. The boy became so
terrible in his anger on future occasions and so successful as a fighter
that his bullying thereafter ceased, and his status in the school thereafter
was different. Whether this really occurred in a dream state or was mere
simulation I cannot say.
DR. A. A. BRILL, New York City: I must say that the mechanisms described so
interestingly by Pres. Hall are found in our patients during analysis and I
believe that almost all of them belong to the love and hate principles. This
may not seem so on superficial examination, thus, I have on record nine
cases of women who were suffering from various forms of psychoneurosis, one
of whose symptoms was screaming. Every once in a while they had to scream.
It was an obsessive screaming. Questioning elicited that the screaming
always occurred when they were thinking of some terrible or painful thought.
For instance, one woman went through fancies of killing her husband and when
she came to the idea of shooting him, she began to scream. Here one might
think that it was an ethical struggle which had nothing to do with sex, but
if one considers that it was against her husband that her anger was
directed, that she wished to kill him because he abused her and that there
was another man in the case, it becomes quite clear that the anger had a
sexual motive.
Concerning new formulations, I feel that there is nothing against
promulgating new attitudes and theories, provided one has sufficient cause
for doing so. Formulations based on insufficient data and hastily
constructed are dangerous, to say the least. Prof. Freud is most careful in
formulating new theories. He gathers his material for years before he puts
it forth in the form of tentative theories and does not hesitate to modify
them if occasion demands. Nor is it true that the Freudians ignore the work
done by others. Freud and his followers give due credit to other observers,
but as the Freudian mechanisms have opened up so many new fields for
investigation, we naturally give most of our time to this work. That does
not at all signify that we ignore everything else, as some believe. Freud
himself continually urges that the psychoanalytic problems should be taken
up by observers in other fields than medicine and I was, therefore,
extremely pleased to hear Prof. Hall's formulations of anger. I do not
believe, however, that his paper shows that we are overestimating the sexual
impulse. Basically, all his mechanisms come under the heading of "Sex," as
we understand it.
DR. L. E. EMERSON, Boston, Mass: I wish to express my delight in President
Hall's paper. It seems to me what he has done has been to show the breadth
of the Freudian conception of sex. The word sex as the Freudians use it,
includes all personal relations and even personality; and it is apparently
in question only as to whether one is going to draw a line at one place and
say everything on this side is sex and the other side personality, or
whether one is going to enlarge the concept of sex to include personality.
That as I understand it, is what Dr. White has also said. It seems to me the
value of the sex conception lies in the fact that while it can be expanded,
and is illimitable, at the same time it focuses, it does come to a point.
Personalities as talked of ordinarily have no point, they are too vague. On
the other hand, a man who has a mind no bigger than a pinhole is too
circumscribed to be capable of understanding any very broad generalization.
If one can grasp a conception that does have a center, even though no
circumference, he has got hold of a very valuable generalization.
DR. E. E. SOUTHARD, Boston: Dr. Jelliffe has just brought into ridicule
what he terms "pinhole psychiatry;" but as I remember it, there is a
technical method in psychology whereby things may be more clearly visible
through a pin-hole!
The valuable thing about President Hall's communication is that the
fundamental distinction is brought out between two groups of workers in
psychopathology. I should be inclined to divide the people in this room
into what might be termed emotional monists and emotional pluralists. The
Freudian theory is in general a theory of emotional monism and therefore
fundamentally must satisfy a great many of the Hegelian tenets. Hence,
perhaps Dr. Putnam's adherence to both Hegel and Freud. Now as I understand
it, what Dr. Prince wants is an emotional pluralism such as might well be
founded upon the data in MacDougall's "Social Psychology" and in Shand's
work on "The Foundations of Character." This view of emotional pluralism is
one which I should myself be compelled to hold. We must remember, however,
that the work of Cannon on various types of emotion may possibly show that
different emotions which look vastly unlike (e. g. fear and rage) may be in
some sense equivalents. Fear may be equivalent to rage much as different
types of energy in the physical universe are equivalent to one another. The
emotions may be interchangeable in some sense so that it might be possible
that sex emotion and the emotion of fear are translatable. In this way there
might be constructed a fundamental monism of emotion in the same sense that
energetics is a science which unifies electricity, heat, magnetism, etc. It
would not seem to me, however, appropriate to identify all kinds of emotion
with the sexual.
PRESIDENT HALL: It would take an encylopedia and an omniscient mind. and
many hours and days to exhaust such a topic as this. Dr. Southard has said
some of the things I would have said. I supposed this society was primarily
interested in pragmatic discussions. At any rate, I left the American
Philosophical Society some years ago and entered this to get rid of
metaphysics and arid abstractions. As to what Dr. Swift says, it seems to me
imitation plays a great but is by no means the sole role. It is of course
purely instinctive, and the social instinct comes in everywhere, so much so
that discussion on almost any topic is liable to raise the question of the
individual versus the social forces in the world. As to Dr. Jelliffe's
opinion whether after all hate and love are at bottom the same, he perhaps
bottoms on the recent discussions of what I might call the expanded theory
of ambivalence, as represented by Weissfeld. But I do not interpret this to
mean that there is any sense whatever that has any pragmatic value in the
statement that love and hate are the same. If you assume this, one is dizzy
and the world seems to spin around. Hegel showed a sense in which being and
not being are the same but that is a most abstract and purely methodological
statement. What in the world is more opposite than love and hate, from every
practical and truly psychological point of view? We must not be credulous
about the unconscious and ascribe to it absurdities, nor must we lose our
orientation for surely up and down, right and left, light and dark, do
differ. If the unconscious can be used to cause a darkness in which
everything loses its identity and fuses into a general menstrum, as Hegel
said all cows were black in the dark, it seems to me we can get nowhere.
Ought we not to start by admitting that there are certain immense
differences in the emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, and that the
tendency to find a common background or identify them is a matter largely of
speculative interest?
DR. MORTON PRINCE, Boston, read by title a paper entitled "The Theory of
'Settings' and the Psychoneuroses."
DR. L. PIERCE CLARK, New York, N. Y., read a paper entitled, 'The Mechanism
of Essential Epilepsy."[*]
[*] Reserved for publication.