The Troubled Conscience and the Insane Mind (Psychology Revivals)

Charles Blondel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317804475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1928 in the Psyche Miniatures Medical Series, this title was an attempt to bring to the attention of British psychologists and psychiatrists some aspects of the work and thought of French psychologist Charles Blondel. Well known abroad but little known in England at the time, he was professor of Psychology at the University of Strasbourg and founder of a school of 'morbid psychology'.

This book contains two papers, the first concerning the theory of the disordered mind and the second deals with the relation between disordered thought and speech. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

I.

THE INSANE MIND

I have chosen the insane mind as the subject of this essay, because I shall then be able to deal with the system of ideas which has drawn most attention to my work. It has seemed to me that what would be most interesting to those who do not know that work would be to learn what are the really essential elements in the ideas which I have put forward, while I hope to satisfy a certain curiosity in others by discussing that work. Such an essay as this is fortunately confined within certain natural limits. Its relative brevity forces one to ignore details, to leave out connecting links, and thus to bring out the more clearly the strength or weakness of the whole structure of ideas dealt with.

I shall, therefore, outline the genesis of those ideas which I have expressed in La Conscience Morbide, Egoism is detestable no doubt. But we psychologists are obliged by the nature of our calling to treat it with a little indulgence, and to tell the story of one’s thought is often an act of humility rather than one of arrogance. All of which amounts to saying that I owe more to the teachers who have influenced me, and to the facts which I have observed, than I do to my own efforts!

Somewhere about 1900, when I was beginning my medical studies, two movements upon which I wish for the moment to focus your attention, were among many others, developing in the world of French thought. I mean the movements led by Durkheim, and by Bergson.

It is not my intention to expound the ideas of Durkheim. Only one point need now occupy our attention, to wit: the peculiar importance of sociology for psychology owing to the tendency of the former to supplant the latter. One of the cardinal points in Durkheim’s teaching is that though physiological phenomena may not explain those psychological, the psychological fail equally to explain collective phenomena. The social group is something more than the sum of the individuals which compose it. It lives its own life, dominating the individual by its conditions and its laws. Its being expresses itself in the individual mind, so to speak, by systems of ideas, rules, and imperatives which were not there brought to birth at the mere instigation of the environment in which this individual (mind) moves, but came to it ready-made and with all the rigidity imparted to them by the universalization of the group. Moral, religious and social conceptions, institutions, and legal rights, are not the result of the more or less concerted co-operation of individuals, but are imposed upon them by the group.

As a result, psychology is, by itself, unable to give a complete account of the development of individual minds. Mental life in its highest form belongs to the realm of sociology. Between lower and higher, simple and complex, it is no longer merely a question of the difference between the methods used for their study, but of a difference of kind. Collective representations—to speak the language of sociology—ideas which the individual is incapable of creating by himself, which are imposed upon him from the outside, which inspire him with fear, love or respect—all these are social things. The more Durkheim’s work developed, the wider grew the realm of these collective representations which were thus withdrawn from the realm of psychology. Durkheim, no doubt, admits that organic changes, sensations, perceptions, and elementary emotions are of a psychological nature. But in his last book the laws of logic, categories, and concepts, the whole system of knowledge and action, of intelligence and reason, take on a social character; so that there is, so to speak, no corner of psychological life left which is not filled with collective representations.

Finally, Lévy-Bruhl has shown that it is impossible to reproduce in our own minds the thoughts of primitive races because the whole life of these people is scored from one end to another by collective influences. Not only can their higher mental manifestations—knowledge, religion, ethics, art—be neither compared nor in any way reduced to ours, but primitive peoples do not feel, sense, perceive or imagine in a manner in any way resembling ours. At this point psychology gives the impression of having been practically routed from its own domain, and of being in the last resort reduced to psycho-physics and to psycho-physiology. Given the stimulus and the immediate psychological repercussion, the conscious sequel will be determined by laws acting from without. Society does not create man, does not endow him with intellect. But his potential intellect becomes dynamic and concrete only as a function of the society of which he is a part. Similarly, with regard to consciousness as a whole, it is society which informs it and enables it to pass from a state of potentiality to one of action.

All this is rather disturbing news for psychologists. It becomes more disturbing still if we bring it into line with another claim made from an opposite pole of contemporary thought by a metaphysical system standing out in bold defiance of all our accustomed habits of thought. It will be sufficient for me to stress one element only—an essential one it is true—in Bergson’s thought. According to Bergson, the light of clear consciousness does not enable us to grasp immediate psychological reality. The latter underlies the former. “Clear consciousness” only presents to us psychological reality fundamentally modified in its structure by practical necessities, by intelligence, language, and by society. Their converging pressure introduces into consciousness a rigidity which imitates matter and is essential to life, but which is repugnant to the essential nature of psychological being.

Bergson holds that Consciousness or Mind which can be broken up into elements according to mechanical laws of thought, which can be divided into states according to the established articulations of language is a socialized consciousness or mind, happily adapted to the necessities of practical life, but no longer marked by immediacy. Bergson’s ideas are no doubt metaphysical. But his metaphysics is permeated by a sound and ingenious psychology, which has been put to the test and not found wanting. Ten years before Pierre Marie as clinician and pathological anatomist brought about that great revolution in the domain of aphasia, as early as 1896, Bergson—thus splendidly vindicating the much abused psychology of reflection—Bergson refused to give credence to the then classical theories of aphasia. A precedent this, which undoubtedly gives food for thought!

Be that as it may, the important point for us is that these two great movements of thought, opposed though they were in origin, in tendency, and in spirit, yet contrived to meet at least at one point. For very different reasons and with widely diverging aims, they not only made psychologists aware of the influence exercised upon the play of mind by society and language, but urged them to draw their own conclusions from these findings.

To come back to myself and my work, however, after this digression which we have found imposed upon us. In 1906, having finished with examinations and candidatures, I devoted myself exclusively to mental diseases, working at the Salpêtrière under the direction of my revered teacher, Dr. Deny. Open-minded, independent, ever on the look-out for new ideas, he was one of the first in France to welcome the theories of Kraepelin, and to introduce them into his books and teaching. I lay stress on this merely to show how unwilling were those, among whom I worked so long, to rest on the discoveries of the past, and how ready were they to realize anew each day the always virgin freshness of the problems which confronted them. It was under this propitious discipline that I first began to examine the insane. Let me state quite shortly the method which I used in my observations. In the friendly converse by means of which I ough to penetrate into patients’ minds, I avoided, as far as in me lay, anything that might resemble cross-questioning; I let them speak without interruption, convinced that the fewer and the more discreet my questions, the more likely were the patients to yield up the secret of their ill in all its nakedness. In this way I studied cases for whole months and years together. I used also frequently to take up my stand in the corner of some room or courtyard, and there spend many hours watching patients living and acting according to their own devices. Thus I slowly acquired a cumulative experience, indispensable as I believe to the understanding of insanity.

My curiosity was very soon attracted by those patients who, without suffering any diminution of their intellectual powers, properly so-called, were yet to be recognized, whether plainly delirious or not, by the anxiety which accompanied the development of their trouble. But the more deeply I studied these cases, the less I understood them, for they seemed to me incomparable to any others. I could see no way of connecting their way of thinking with ours, nor of reaching a direct understanding of their trouble. Let us take an example, if you like—the depersonalized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. The Insane Mind
• II. Insane Thought and Language