250 PSYCHIATRY 



We as alienists do not need a large vocabulary or very recondite 

 knowledge of psychology. We do not require to hold opinions on 

 association theories, or on parallelism or monism, or epistemology. 



We do very much need definite descriptions and harmonious 

 views of the elementary mental processes. 



We deal in disorders of sensation and perception, in failures of 

 memory, perversion of judgment, states of feeling either too intense 

 or depressed, loss of the volitional function, and disorders of in- 

 stinctive reactions, of memory and of consciousness. Yet it is not 

 easy to find these states clearly defined among psychologic author- 

 ities. I have a list of the psychologic terms used to describe groups or 

 individual symptoms in psychiatry. This vocabulary of involved 

 symptoms has only about twenty-five terms, but they mean different 

 things according as the physician takes his psychology. 



Psychiatry is having its great difficulty in classifying its cases. 

 Practically every writing alienist has a special classification of his 

 own. This is in part because cases cannot be observed completely 

 or recorded thoroughly without a proper language for recording 

 the facts. The older alienists never knew the science of psychology, 

 because there was none; the modern are only learning it. A thorough 

 and especially a uniform understanding of psychology is necessary 

 in order to give sharper definition to observed phenomena, to bring 

 out new facts and to clarify the symptomatology and make us 

 agree upon our groupings. For example melancholia used to be 

 considered as essentially a morbid depression of the mind. Now 

 we know there are other elements such as retardation and diffi- 

 culty of thought and action, of disturbance of attention and voli- 

 tion; we find, in fact, that there may even be a melancholia with- 

 out any melancholy. It is in the observation of the often obvious 

 psychic states and in the correct record of all deviations that we 

 may expect to make real progress. And we need a uniform psych- 

 ologic vocabulary for our purpose, as well as a pretty thorough 

 psychologic training. 



I have collected from the writings of Stout, Morgan, James, 

 Baldwin, Ladd, Calkins, Titchener, Sully, the definitions or views 

 given by them of the elementary and other mental processes: 



Sensation, impression, perception, percept, conception, concept, 

 image, idea, ideation, judgment, reason, reasoning, emotion, feeling, 

 sentiment, conation, will, volition, consciousness, memory, associa- 

 tion. There is substantial agreement about the significance of perhaps 

 the majority of them, and I quite understand that the mind is not 

 to be divided into sharply limited mental processes, but that mental 

 states are all complex and that one process overlaps another. 



Nevertheless, there are decided differences and vaguenesses in 

 the views of sensation, perception, of concept, memory, image, 



