A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
History
A Psychiatric Milestone: Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921
Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane; Mental illness
Most of us grew up with the attitude of a fatalistic intellectual
hopelessness. How could we ever be clear on the relation of mind and
body? How could mind and soul ever arise out of matter? How can we
harmonize strict science with what we try to do in our treatment of
patients? How can we, with our mechanistic science, speak of effort, and
of will to do better? How can we meet the invectives against the facts
of matter on the part of the opposing idealistic philosophies and their
uncritical exploitations in "New Thought"--_i.e._, really the revival of
archaic thought? It is not merely medical usefulness that forced these
broad issues on many a thinking physician, but having to face the facts
all the time in dealing with a living human world. The psychopathologist
had to learn to do more than the so-called "elementalist" who always
goes back to the elements and smallest units and then is apt to shirk
the responsibility of making an attempt to solve the concrete problems
of greater complexity. The psychiatrist has to study individuals and
groups as wholes, as complex units, as the "you" or "he" or "she" or
"they" we have to work with. We recognize that throughout nature we have
to face the general principle of unit-formation, and the fact that the
new units need not be like a mere sum of the component parts but can be
an actually new entity not wholly predictable from the component parts
and known only through actual experience with the specific product.
Hydrogen and oxygen, it is true, can form simple mixtures, but when they
make an actual chemical integration we get a new specific type of
substance, water, behaving and dividing according to its own laws and
properties in a way not wholly predictable from just what we know of
hydrogen and oxygen as such. Analogy prompts us to see in plants and
animals products of physics and chemistry and organization, although the
peculiarity of the product makes us recognize certain specificities of
life not contained in the theory of mere physics and chemistry. All the
facts of experience prompt us to see in mentation a biological function,
and we are no longer surprised to find this product of integration so
different from the nature and functions of all the component parts. All
the apparent discontinuities in the intrinsic harmony of facts, on the
one hand, and the apparent impossibility of accounting for new features
and peculiarities of the new units, are shown to be a general feature of
nature and of facts: integration is not mere summation, but a creation
of ever-new types and units, with superficial discontinuities and with
their own new denominators of special peculiarities; hence there is no
reason to think of an insurmountable and unique feature in the origin of
life, nor even of mentally integrated life; no need of special mystical
sparks of life, of a mysterious spirit, etc.; but--and this is the
important point--also no need of denying the existence of all the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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