Mental pathology in its relation to normal psychology : a course of lectures delivered in the University of Leipzig / by Gustav Störring ; translated by Thomas Loveday.

  • Störring, Gustav, 1860-
Date:
1907
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mental pathology in its relation to normal psychology : a course of lectures delivered in the University of Leipzig / by Gustav Störring ; translated by Thomas Loveday. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    identical, how could observation take place ? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and void. And how entirely contradictory the modes of procedure to which we are simultaneously led by it ! On the one hand we are advised to isolate ourselves as far as possible from every external percep- tion, and especially from all intellectual work ; for if we were to busy ourselves even with the simplest calculation, what would become of internal observation ? On the other hand, after having with the utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, we must begin to contemplate the operations going on in our mind when nothing is taking place there. Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions some day represented on the stage.” * F. A. Lange has expressed himself in a similar way. Here, you see, the possibility of observing mental phenomena is denied, because such observation is taken to presuppose a self-reduplication that is naturally impossible. But of course we will not grant that it does so. Self-observation does not involve self-reduplication. No doubt we may put the facts of self-observation in the words : “7 observe myself,” and it appears as if the subject and the object of the observation were identical. But, as we shall see later, the self is not something simple—it is complex. The actual state of affairs in self-observation is simply this, that attention is directed to a psychical process during its course. It involves the simultaneity of two psychical processes ; but that in itself implies no contradiction. At the same time it is true that the direction of attention to psychical processes during their course may modify them ; every one knows that an emotion loses force the more attention is concentrated upon it. The usual way out of this difficulty is to say that even if observa- tion of mental phenomena is impossible when they are actually present, still we are conscious of them at the time and can make them objects of observation as soon as they are over : we cannot observe an emotion while it is present, but attention does not impair a reproduced emotion. Surely it is very unfortunate if we must thus renounce the attempt to apprehend in full clearness and distinctness, by means of concentrated attention, a mental phenomenon which we wish to observe, and which perhaps occurs but rarely in the play of our mental processes ; and I maintain that we need not entirely abandon the use of attention for this pur- pose. It all depends what direction we give to it. If we concen- * Cours de Philosophic positive, I, pp. 34, ff. [The translation is indebted to James, Principles of Psychology, I, p. 182.—TV.]