i8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ated with the name of psychoanalysis, it would be difficult to deny that 

 the responsibility for psj^choanalysis rests to some extent with the 

 psychologists ourselves. The neurologist found himself confronted 

 with certain problems psychological in their nature, with which the 

 academic psychology had largely thought best not to concern itself. It 

 is true that we have an " individual " psychology ; one of the differences 

 in simple reaction time, in color vision, or in memory for nonsense 

 syllables, various elementary traits among which it has been difficult 

 to establish relationships or other than superficial interpretation. 

 From a medical standpoint it is better to give up this Problemstellung 

 of individual differences in functions, for one, so to speak, of individ- 

 ual differences in individuals. The medical requirement is rather for 

 a psychology that shall seek the correlation of objective methods for 

 studying the personality with the mental reactions of that personality 

 in the greater laboratory of mundane experience. The key-word to 

 what medical psychology should be, and what academic psychology 

 has not been, is, in fact, "personality." To our conventional chapter- 

 headings of imagination, will, habit, experience and the like, let us 

 mentally add the words as they affect the 'personality, if we wish to 

 reach the standpoint of the greatest help in the medical relation. We 

 shall study the mental evolution of the individual, rather than the 

 genetic psychology of different mental faculties. Our psychology will 

 be one of conduct, reactions, adjustments. As such we shall pay 

 greater heed to feeling as a disturber of these adjustments. We shall 

 start from the standpoint of the " mind as an adaptive mechanism " ; 8 

 the personality as a sum of various tendencies in mental adaption or 

 reaction-type. We shall study the various mental means through 

 which different personalities react upon, or adjust themselves to, the 

 vital situations they meet. We shall learn how some personalities react 

 in ways that involve mental good, others in ways that involve mental 

 harm, and we shall inquire into the modifiability of these reaction 

 types, with the view to their possible amelioration. 



Though having a somewhat different outlook upon the matter, and 

 expressing it in different terms, it appears that the things which 

 Prince 9 finds to criticize in the pathological relations of the academic 

 psychology are essentially the same. 



The problems with which normal psychology has chosen to deal are exceed- 

 ingly interesting from the point of view of the higher culture, but they scarcely 

 touch the vital questions which the disturbed, distressed human organism pre- 

 sents to the physician. . . .If normal psychology is to become an applied science 

 and in particular to become of help to medicine, ... it must occupy itself more 

 than it has done with problems of dynamics, of mechanism, of function. 



8 Cf . a lucid but uneven article by White, ' ' The Theory of the ' Complex, ' ' ' 

 Interstate Med. Journ., XVI., 1909, No. 14. Also in "Mental Mechanisms," 

 Ch. 4, pp. 48-70. 



9 Journ. Am. Med. Assoc., March 30, 1912, 918-921. 



