Psychogenesis

“ It is sufficient for our purpose to show the bearing of the facts of localization of function upon the problem of psychogenesis. The first proposition derived from these facts is, that psychosis and neurosis are phenomena having common space-relations. ”

“ Selective mating is a product of the mental symbolism so developed. It is itself a product of psychogenesis. What is the law of psychogenesis? Since the present investigation is psychological, not metaphysical, we must keep strictly to the psychic plane, and leave out of account the question whether, and if so how, our experience stands related to a noumenal existence. ”

“ Touching the psychogenesis of a child, I have shown that there is unquestionable demonstration of a gradual and uninterrupted passage from the one order of ideation to the other; that so long as the child’s intelligence is moving only in the non-conceptual sphere, it is not distinguishable in any one feature of psychological import from the intelligence of the higher mammalia ”

“ A study of the psychogenesis of a concrete case will on the one hand illustrate these principles and, on the other, the structure and dynamics of normal personality.
Before making such a study, however, we ought to have a working conception of the normal; and this we are entitled, from the point of view of dynamic psychology, to construct on the basis of data supplied by studies of abnormal and normal mental behavior. The older way of considering human personality was to conceive it as an “ego” with various faculties. ”

“ Our higher æsthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the mind is assailed. [Pg 628] The way of 'experience' proper is the front door, the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this way immediately become the mind's objects. ”

“ For a complete understanding of the psychogenesis of any given psychoneurosis, such as a phobia, we must know all the antecedent experiences which formed the setting and gave meaning to the dominating ideas and determined the instincts which have become incorporated with them to form sentiments. ”

“ Very important, too, for psychogenesis, are reports concerning the physiological condition and activity of children whose mental development has seemed to be stopped for months, or to be made considerably slower, or to be unusually hastened. ”

“ They are essentially problems of psychogenesis—the development of the various mental reactions and tendencies of which individual character and temperament are built up. It is readily discernible that a growing emphasis is laid in psychopathology upon the determining if not conditioning rôle of psychogenic factors in a variety of conditions, ranging from hysteria to the manic-depressive group; though the scientific development of methods, or their application to the study of normal mental reaction types, has been largely conspicuous in absence. ”

“ Among cultural peoples, the child is surrounded by influences inseparable from the processes that arise spontaneously within its own consciousness. Folk psychology, however, in its investigation of the various stages of mental development still exhibited by mankind, leads us along the path of a true psychogenesis. ”

“ The question, therefore, only arises with reference to those superadded faculties which are represented above the level marked 28, where the upward growth of animal intelligence ends, and the growth of distinctively human intelligence begins. But even at level 28 the human mind is already in possession of many of its most useful faculties, and these it does not afterwards shed, but carries them upwards with it in the course of its further development—as we well know by observing the psychogenesis of every child. ”

“ The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the interaction between the individual and the outer universe. Which means that just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the fœtus, so does every man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves. It is the circuit of vital flux between itself and another being or beings which brings about the development and evolution of every individual psyche and physique. ”

“ Here we have, then, a purely subjective mental activity acting through a mechanism of which the boy is quite ignorant, and which he is unable to control, and producing that action on the vessels of dilation or contraction which, as we have seen, is the essential condition of brain activity and the evolution of thought, and is related to the quickening or the abolition of consciousness, and to the activity or abeyance of function in the will centers and upper convolutions of the brain, as in its other centers of localization. ”

“ They who want to reduce biology to mechanism should reflect on the meaning of evolution. From a mechanical standpoint, evolution,―the basis of biology, is meaningless. Molecules, atoms and their vibrations can have neither lower nor higher stages, they are all on the same plane, following the same laws from all eternity.
If from our long digression on the nature of the biological process, we now return to the subject under discussion, namely, the psychological process, we can realize clearly the point of view from which psychic life should be regarded. ”

“ The higher psychic activity that civilized man calls his "mental life," and that is so often regarded as a kind of miracle, is merely a higher development of the psychic function we find at a lower level in the savage, and is shared by him with the higher vertebrates. Comparative psychology shows us, as I have explained in the seventh chapter of the Riddle, the long scale of development, which leads from the simple cell-soul of the protist up to the intelligence of man. ”

“ The psychic life and the mental activity of human beings is conditioned by three factors. The first, heredity, denotes the accumulation of experiences and consequent structural modifications acquired by the race during the process of its adjustment to its environment; the manifestation of the result of this experience in behaviour is called instinct. The second is the result of the habits and acquirements of the individual from the moment of conception to the end of his existence: this, together with the first, produces what we call character. ”

“ On the whole, few recent formulas have done more service in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations.' The adjustment is to immediately present objects in lower animals and in infants. It is to objects more and more remote in time and space, and inferred by means of more and more complex and exact processes of reasoning, when the grade of mental development grows more advanced. ”

“ It is more or less fashionable at present to consider all abnormal psychic conditions, in so far as they are of exogenic growth, as the consequences of hereditary degeneration, and not as essentially influenced by the psychology of the patient and the environment. ”

“ The new situation revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. The Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life. Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments, does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and sensationalistic aspects of human experience. ”

“ Just as the functions of an embryologist are confined to tracing the mere history of developmental changes of living structure, and just as he is thus as far as ever from throwing any light upon the deeper questions of the how and the why of life; so in seeking to indicate the steps whereby self-consciousness has arisen from the lower stages of mental structure, I am as far as any one can be from throwing light upon the intrinsic nature of that the probable genesis of which I am endeavouring to trace. ”

“ We may thus lay down in a general sort of way a conception which I like to call the theory of psychophysical progression, fixation and regression along evolutionary and developmental lines. In the case of tics the regressive or devolutionary aspect comes in for special consideration. We may react mainly physically, or mainly psychically. But as a rule we react by both physical and psychic means, the manner and degree of our conduct being determined, as above mentioned, by our stage in evolution and development. ”

“ It was while studying the child's imitations and their relation to volition that there came to him such a revelation concerning the function of imitation in the evolution of mind that he resolved to work out a theory of mental development embodying this new insight; and he soon saw that no consistent view of mental development in the individual could be reached without a doctrine of the race development of consciousness. With this conviction he undertook to make a synthesis of the biological theory of organic adaptation with the conception of infant development he had already reached. ”

“ Is it not then reasonable to believe that there is a corresponding psychic or soul development from generation to generation in the unseen individuality, the ego, which uses the cerebrum and cerebellum as organs; that up the spiral stairway of evolution the whole man has come,—his personality, with its soul powers, and the physical organs of these powers in the brain, and the entire physical man? ”

“ Again, so long as it is passing through the lower phases of its development, the human mind assuredly ascends through a scale of mental faculties which are parallel with those that are permanently presented by the psychological species of the animal kingdom. A glance at the Diagram which I have placed at the beginning of my previous work will serve to show in how strikingly quantitative, as well as qualitative, a manner the development of an individual human mind follows the order of mental evolution in the animal kingdom. ”

“ In other words, the first genesis of true self-consciousness marks a comparatively low level in the evolution of the human mind—as we might expect that it should, if its genesis depends upon, and therefore lies so near to, those precedent conditions in merely animal psychology to which I have assigned it. ”

“ In biology, the arrest of development modifies the organ in its function and structure, and often acts by rebound on other organs; in psychology the same thing happens, and, in addition, the arrested development of a tendency modifies its nature and its reaction on cognate phenomena. ”

“ Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed brain, their position would be less untenable. ”

“ We find another series of strong arguments in favour of our Monistic psychology in the individual development of the soul in the child and the young animal. We know that the new-born child has as yet no consciousness, no intelligence, no independent judgment and thought. We follow the gradual development of these higher faculties step by step in the first years of life, in strict proportion to the anatomical development of the cortex with which they are bound up. ”

“ If this portion of the brain indicates a full development, we [pg 155] say of such a temperament that it is VITAL, because the functions of its nerve-centers are favorable to evolution. As degeneration observes conditions, so endurance and development conform to certain laws, and it is the duty of all truthful inquirers, who believe not only in the progress of human intelligence, but in physical improvement from generation to generation, to ascertain and comply with these essential conditions. ”

“ The infant in its psychic growth no doubt passes through the inferior types of moment-consciousness, but in a most general and sketchy form. The ontogenesis of psychic life is probably as much an epitome of its phylogenesis as the ontogenesis of biosis is an epitome of its phylogenesis. ”

“ It was, of course, natural that in the study of these phantasms, as elsewhere, the therapeutic interest should have preceded the psychological, but in the newer practical study of eugenics—the study which aims at improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving it—experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is the experimental study of mental visions. ”

“ Consciousness in the course of its development is presented in a series of stages and types, each lower stage leading to the next higher and more complicated stage and type. This does not mean that the higher type is included in the lower We must assume spontaneous mental variations, or psychic mutations, so that while the stages and types are arranged in a progressive series of their development and complication, they at the same time differ qualitatively in type of mental life. ”