famous—pushed the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions
practically hitherto untouched. He was not alone. His colleague,
Professor Raymond, and others in France and Germany, all work with the
same main ideas. Janet’s books read like romances. His studies on
Psychological Automatism, the Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and
Fixed Ideas, and many others on the part played by the unconscious, were
such rich mines of fact and suggestion that Professor William James, in
his “Principles of Psychology,” said of them: “All these facts taken
together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is
destined to throw a new light into the very abysses of our nature.”
Curiously, not in this country—the country of great psychologists,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith,
James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the dead, and whole
schools of distinguished psychologists among the living—not in this
country, but in America, was the value of the new material seriously
considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this country,
Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not
readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar
studies. It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this
field are in intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich
outgrowths of morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our
English students of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as
important as any done in the world, but it is none the less true that,
until a few years ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond, Bernheim, Beaunis,
not to speak of Moll, Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically unstudied
here. In America it has been entirely different. Even the names of the
men are now familiar in our English magazines—Muensterberg, Morton
Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not to mention
William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as if every new idea unearthed
in the Old World is put to the test by someone in the new. Britain
remains curiously cold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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