RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 187 



tion, by Dr. M. D. Eder, of Studies in Word-Association : Ex- 

 periments in the Diagnosis of Psycho- Pathological Conditions 

 carried out at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich 

 under the direction of Dr. C. G. Jung (Heinemann, 191 8). It 

 consists of a collection of papers published in the Journal fiir 

 Psychologie und Neurologie, by Jung and others of his school. 

 The essence of this psychological method is in requiring the 

 person experimented upon to respond to a given word by another 

 word — the first that comes into his head on hearing the word 

 given. The reaction-time is then recorded. It is found to 

 average 1*5 seconds for the educated ; 2 seconds for the un- 

 educated. It is much longer where the word given has a 

 strong emotional tone. There is also wide variation in the 

 type of association. The word " bat," for instance, may in- 

 duce the response " mammal " or " twilight," etc., or a mere 

 rhyming response like " hat." It is curious that the more 

 superficial types of reaction are especially characteristic of 

 educated persons. The responses of the uneducated are 

 deeper ; with them words are more closely associated with their 

 actual meanings, whereas in the educated they more resemble 

 counters or symbols which are dealt with by the mind in rela- 

 tive independence of their meaning. One paper by Dr. Bins- 

 wanger deals with the psychogalvanic phenomenon, where the 

 occurrence of emotional processes sets up deviations in a 

 galvanometer connected to the person experimented upon. 

 The whole method of word-association is of extraordinary 

 interest, in bringing to the surface highly significant clues to 

 the deep, concealed and unconscious mentality of the indi- 

 vidual. 



Dr. Jung himself paid a visit to England in July ; and 

 on the nth of that month read a paper at the Royal Society 

 of Medicine in defence of a belief in the psychogenesis of mental 

 diseases. He prefaced his remarks by an attack on scientific 

 materialism, though it is hard to see how the views which 

 he put forward in any way conflicted with that philosophy. 

 Materialism is simply a theory as to the nature of psychical 

 processes ; the materialist regards a psychical or mental occur- 

 rence merely as the outward symbol of some neural occur- 

 rence, not yet experimentally isolated ; and he can have no 

 objection to the theory that disease may originate by disturb- 

 ances of nervous functioning in regions less accessible to 



