The valuable thing about President Hall's communication is that the
fundamental distinction is brought out between two groups of workers in
psychopathology. I should be inclined to divide the people in this room
into what might be termed emotional monists and emotional pluralists. The
Freudian theory is in general a theory of emotional monism and therefore
fundamentally must satisfy a great many of the Hegelian tenets. Hence,
perhaps Dr. Putnam's adherence to both Hegel and Freud. Now as I understand
it, what Dr. Prince wants is an emotional pluralism such as might well be
founded upon the data in MacDougall's "Social Psychology" and in Shand's
work on "The Foundations of Character." This view of emotional pluralism is
one which I should myself be compelled to hold. We must remember, however,
that the work of Cannon on various types of emotion may possibly show that
different emotions which look vastly unlike (e. g. fear and rage) may be in
some sense equivalents. Fear may be equivalent to rage much as different
types of energy in the physical universe are equivalent to one another. The
emotions may be interchangeable in some sense so that it might be possible
that sex emotion and the emotion of fear are translatable. In this way there
might be constructed a fundamental monism of emotion in the same sense that
energetics is a science which unifies electricity, heat, magnetism, etc. It
would not seem to me, however, appropriate to identify all kinds of emotion
with the sexual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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