Abnormality

“ On this basis, the above remarks on perception seem undeniable. We are often misled as to what is happening, either by peculiarities of the medium between the object and our bodies, or by unusual states of our bodies, or by a temporary or permanent abnormality in the brain. But in all these cases something is really happening, as to which, if we turn our attention to it, we can obtain knowledge that is not misleading. ”

“ We all know how valuable the observation and study of all forms of anomalies or variations from the normal type or species proved to the final establishment of the theory of evolution. The pre-Darwinian zoologist ignored variation regarding it simply as an exception to the normal, as a mere abnormality, as a pathological manifestation which is of little value to the scientist, who is only occupied with the discovery of general laws, laws of the normal. ”

“ All these organic variations which I have here mentioned to illustrate sexual inversion, are abnormalities. It is important that we should have a clear idea as to what abnormality is. Many people imagine that what is abnormal is necessarily diseased. That is not the case, unless we give the word disease an inconveniently and illegitimately wide extension. ”

“ If at the present moment any of them is acting abnormally, that abnormality is becoming less every day, so that quite soon it will have vanished completely, and the organ will have recovered its normal function. ”

“ In some cases the only abnormality that is found is that of an undue tendency to respond by non-specific reactions, most of them being common and there being no excessive number of individual reactions. ”

“ They must be human as we are, moved by impulses common, [Pg 265] in some degree, to us all. Generally speaking, abnormality is weakness. It needs to be strongly built upon a foundation of natural qualities to achieve success. ”

“ This belief is erroneous and is only given credence to by people who had not thought much on the subject, and especially by those who belong to the so-called "new psychology" school. As a matter of fact the abnormal in scientific research precedes that, of the normal. The investigation of the abnormal is one of the most potent instruments for new discoveries. The method of experimentation, the most powerful tool of modern science, is in fact the creation of artificial conditions, in other words, the effecting of abnormal states. ”

“ I SHALL deal in this paper with abnormal states of several types, all of which, in my opinion, may be grouped under the one concept of disordination. The normal consciousness is in all apparently destroyed or displaced, and very often memory of the abnormal states is lacking. Hence we are often compelled to rely upon ambiguous external indications for our knowledge of the patient's condition during the abnormal state, and any attempt to explain it from the psychological point of view is attended with difficulty and open to attack. ”

“ It will generally be found, however, that the abnormal, simply from the fact that it is abnormal—an outlaw to all that is now considered fixed and established in science—is the key to a higher law and a broader generalization. ”

“ After all, it is the consequences of a theory which count, and this will be seen to be true particularly as respects memory. The pragmatic point of view of counting the consequences, of determining the difference 11that the theory makes in the understanding of the mental processes of normal and abnormal life, reveals the importance to us of validating the theory. The consequences of the psycho-physiological theory are so far-reaching, in view of its bearing upon a large number of problems in normal and abnormal psychology, that it is worthy of sustained and exhaustive examination. ”

“ Strictly speaking the normal is not at all a scientific concept, it is purely provisional in its nature, and holds only good from a restricted point of view in transitional stages of science. The normal is that which is common; the normal is the usual; and it is not the usual, but the unusual that gives birth to new life in science. The unusual attracts our attention and reveals to us the function and role played by the particular affected product in the total compound. ”

“ But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses, [Pg 247] if of simple objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' according as they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects, we call them 'percepts' when vivid, 'concepts' or 'thoughts' when faint. ”

“ Where the compound is highly complex, where the constituent factors and their relations are imperfectly or all but unknown and are not therefore under control, the spontaneous occurrence of some anomaly ought to be greeted enthusiastically, as it discloses the role played by the modified or excluded factor. This is specially true in the case of mental life, where the phenomena under investigation are the most complex in the whole domain of science, where a direct modification of the functioning mental activity is as a rule impossible without the production of some anomaly. ”

“ To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of consciousness are instinct, reason, emotion and intuition. These four states of consciousness are functions of the normal mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts of the mind, mental disease results. ”

“ A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstraction, and all our concrete states of mind are representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Objects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present thought is of ABCDEFG, the next one will be of BCDEFGH, and the one after that of CDEFGHI—the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss. ”

“ From this standpoint pathology is of the utmost importance in the study of organic life. The pathological being the normal out of place, the abnormal being the normal under special conditions, pathology that deals with the abnormal gives us a deep insight into the general laws of normal physiological activity. ”

“ Objectively regarded, what nature presents is only sequences of events, or phenomena, and the only relationship observed between cause and effect is simply one of invariable sequence. If of two phenomena one antecedent and the other consequent, the consequent is invariably observed to depend in its variation on the antecedent, such an antecedent is declared to be the cause of the consequent. To give an illustration. If a stone falls from a certain height on a heap of many layers of thin glass, the stone in falling breaks the glass. ”

“ When into a chaos of detached observations is introduced an observation akin to them in which a causal relation is discernible, it forthwith commences assimilating to itself from this heap of observations those which are congruous, and tends even to coerce into union those of which the congruity is not manifest. ”

“ The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the 'field' of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all. ”

“ That memory has physiological correlatives we must regard as one of the fundamental assumptions of psychology, both normal and abnormal. What I protest against is the metaphysical "Unconscious" which claims to take place of subjective facts. ”

“ The phenomena of imperative concepts, insistent or fixed ideas, uncontrollable impulses, all grow and develop along the general lines of the synthetic moment. They are reinstatements of portions of dissociated moments buried in the subconscious and growing by the process of modification with each recurrent reinstatement. ”

“ The disorders of the human organism which is the most intricate and complex structure in the world, and the exact means of putting them right are the most difficult and complex study, and in being so they yield a large scope for fallacies of observation and inference. ”

“ What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. ”

“ If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, according to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled good, or order be relatively replete with exquisite and subtile evil. ”

“ The present volume takes a wide survey of the field of error, embracing in its view not only the illusions of sense dealt with in treatises on physiological optics, etc., but also other errors familiarly known as illusions, and resembling the former in their structure and mode of origin. I have throughout endeavoured to keep to a strictly scientific treatment, that is to say, the description and classification of acknowledged errors, and the explanation of these by a reference to their psychical and physical conditions. ”

“ If it be said that the sensation must have some cause, I answer, its cause is the presence of the assemblage of phenomena which is termed the object. When we have asserted that as often as the object is present, and our organs in their normal state, the sensation takes place, we have stated all that we know about the matter. There is no need, after assigning a certain and intelligible cause, to suppose an occult cause besides, for the purpose of enabling the real cause to produce its effect. ”

“ As to the former, I can say no more in dismissing the topic than that to me the phenomena represent a complex conglomerate, in which imperfectly recognized modes of sense-action, hyperæsthesia and hysteria, fraud, conscious and unconscious, chance, collusion, similarity of mental processes, an expectant interest in presentiments and a belief in their significance, nervousness and ill health, illusions of memory, hallucinations, suggestion, contagion, and other elements enter into the composition ”

“ For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite content of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these little changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief in an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. ”

“ The conditions of every causation are multifarious as we look at them in a regressus of causes or a progressus of effects, and as the mind of the individual can make but one judgment at a time, it may be that the one of the causes or effects which is considered, is in fact a trivial element in the causation, for in all our language we are accustomed to speak of one of the causes as the special cause, for it must be the special one in consideration. ”

“ Even apart from this implication, the assumption of the Reality of the [111] phenomenal world destroys itself. To assume the reality of so-called material particles is to lay the foundation of an argument which surely leads to the conclusion that the whole world of my consciousness is produced by and consists in motions in that certain small group of these same molecules which is assumed to make up my brain. ”

“ The represented object floats so to say in a stream of consciousness. The subject matter which the psychologist investigates is not the objective reality itself, but objective states of consciousness. ”

“ When a physiologist or biologist constructs a physiological hypothesis as a correlative of consciousness he is so carried away with it that he soon forgets the purpose of the hypothesis and proceeds to deny the main facts. From a purely scientific we must postulate that each and every act of experience, of consciousness has a physiological correlative, a point on which I have laid special stress. ”

“ In certain conditions of disease, accompanied by great depression of the vital forces, this deviation from normal perception is greatly increased. I have had a patient who presented the following briefly-outlined phenomena:—
After a long illness, during which other interesting psychical phenomena were manifested, as convalescence progressed, I had occasion to notice instances of supernormal perception, and to test it I made use of the following expedient: Taking an old-fashioned copper cent, I carefully enveloped it in a piece of ordinary tissue paper. ”