PRINCIPLES OF NERVOUS BREAKDOWN—SCHIZOKINESIS AND AUTOKINESIS

If we speak boldly of achievement in the study of the most complex structure we know in the universe, the human mind, it is with the conviction that the few steps attained, no matter how feeble they may be, are based on the scientific and objective methodology upon which has been built the great progress of science in the last century, namely, the experimental method initiated by Galileo, which has been applied with especial ingenuity to the higher nervous activity of the living organism by Pavlov. Besides the complexity of our study of the adjustments of the human being, including his subjective life, we are confronted with another difficulty that is not shared by the other sciences today but is, almost exclusively, characteristic of our study. The difficulty I refer to is based on the subjective feelings accompanying our conscious behavior. These give us such an intimacy wit1 every movement of our skeletal frame that we are inclined to take the representation of these mental states as equivalent to the laws revealed to us by the usual scientific analysis or, at least, to confuse the relation of the subjective feelings and the objective laws, to the serious detriment of our investigations. Another disadvantage of the appraisal on the basis of subjective feelings alone is that they, being based mainly on what is revealed to our consciousness, almost entirely neglect the strong hidden current of the autonomic visceral responses. These are either vaguely or not at all represented in consciousness. Their representations, chiefly as emotional feelings, run, moreover, in our consciousness a course that is entirely different from the course revealed by the analysis of the facts obtained through a controlled scientific methodology. To those to whom it is not yet evident that the scientific methodology is appropriate for studying our psychical life and its distressing deviations, I hope this Monograph will provide at least a partial answer. During our attempt to rid ourselves of the present confusion, we must remember that the subjective feelings are of prime importance. Indeed, the objective facts have absolutely no interest for us except through their connection with our subjective feelings. The recognition of the importance of the latter does not, however, warrant the substitution of traditional subjective thinking for modern scientific methodology and analysis. In this monograph, which is devoted to the comparative conditioned neuroses in human and other animals, it would be a crass error to omit a reference to Pavlov, the discoverer of a new field of research so important for us today. More than 50 years ago, he gave a tremendous impetus to the study of phenomena that previously had been designated psychical and unsuitable for exploration by the scientific methodology. Through an accidental observation of an irregularity followed up, he ingeniously adapted a physiological method