The diseases of personality / by Th. Ribot ; tr. from the French by J. Fitzgerald.
- Théodule-Armand Ribot
- Date:
- 1887
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The diseases of personality / by Th. Ribot ; tr. from the French by J. Fitzgerald. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![>■ THE DISEASES OF PERSONAL! By TH. RIBOT. Translated from the French by J. FITZGERALD, M.A. (Copyright, 1887^, by J. Fitzgerald.) CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.—PERSONALITY.—INDI- VIDUALITY.—CONSCIOUSNESS. In the language of psychology the gen- eral meaning of the term person is, an individual being that has a clear conscious- ness of itself and that acts consequently it is the highest form of individuahty. Metaphysical psychology, to explain this character (which it -reserves for man ex- clusively) merely assumes a Me [^j^o], ab- solutely one, simple, and identical.- Un- fortunately, the explanation is illusive, the solution only apparent. Unless we assign a supernattu'al origin to this Me, we must needs explain how it comes to be, and from what lower form it springs. Ex- perimental psychology can neither state the problem in the same way nor treat it by the same method. It learns from nat- ural history how difficult it is in many cases to determine the characters of indi- viduality, far less complex though they be than those of personality; simple, easy solutions it mistrusts, and far from sup- posing the problem to be resolvable at the first attack, it finds the solution at the final term of its researches, as the result of laborious investigations. It is there- fore quite natural that the representatives of the old school, being a little off their bearings, should accuse those of the new school of stealing their Me, though nobody has attempted anything of the kind. But the language of either side is so different from that of the other, and their methods are so opposite that they no longer understand one another. At the risk of increasing the confusion, I would try to find out what is to be learned from teratological, or morbid, or merely rare cases, touching the formation and disorganization of personality, but without pretending to treat the subject in its entirety: that undertaking were, it seems to me, premature. Personality being the highest form of psychic individuality, a preliminary ques- tion arises : What is an individual ? Few problems have in our days been more dis- cussed by naturalists than this, and few remain more obscure as regards the lower grades of animal life. It is not yet time to treat it in detail: in the conclu- sion of this work, after we shall have studied the constituent elements of per- sonality, we will consider personaUty, itself as a whole. Then we shall take ctc-^. casion to compare personality with Viiiej lower forms through which nature foas,-. essayed to produce it, and to show that, the psychic individual is only the exores— sion~ of the organism : like it cf low, grade, undifferentiated, incohe^erit, or- complex and integrated,. For th'=. present, it suffices to remind the reaxle^ who .has.- already some acquaintance, vith these, studies, that as we descend ia,the animal, series, we see the ps,ychi,e iudividual formed by more or less perfect,fusion of less complex individuals—a roIony-con~- sciousness being produced by the co-op- eration of local consciousness. These discoveries in natara! history are of the. utmost importance for psychology. Ow- ing to them the problem of personaljlyi takes a new form : it. must be approached' from below; and Q,ne is led to ask. whether the human, personality itself is, not a coalition wh©le whose extreme, complexity makes its origin difficult to., discover, or even- ijiscrutable, did not the,, existence of .elemental forms throve some, light upon the process of this fusion. Human personality—and of this alone can we treat to. any purpose, especially in. a pathological, essay—is a concrete whole,. a complex. To,know what it is, we must,,,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21074409_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
