Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 Excerpt: ...mode of approach of the psychiatrist and psychopathologist to his immediate task. I have often told of a little experience I had at Kankakee: At the autopsy of a patient who had dropped dead after a hearty meal, I had shown the jury that the man had succumbed to the rupture of his diseased heart muscle. The foreman of the jury, a physician, satisfied with the demonstration of the cause of death, watched me examine the brain and finally asked: "Now, Doctor, show us what you find in the mind." I feel sure that he thought that our knowledge of the brain would give us the safest knowledge of the patient's mental state. I had to refer him for the mental findings to the history or life-record of the case, which in those days was very meager, partly owing to the small number of physicians in proportion to the number of patients, and partly because the physicians had no confidence in the life-record as a scientific fact. Notwithstanding the growth of our knowledge of brains, we have since learned more than ever to express the facts of mind much more definitely in accounts of the personality, and much more in terms of actual life than in fanciful descriptions of brains in terms of what I call neurologizing tautologies. Psychology has learned to make the biography its very frame and starting point, the record of the connected and coherent activity of the individual and the study of the essential parts of the life-record and its determining factors, i.e., the things and experiences that play a role in shaping the life. Psychology is not merely an ultra-erudite and bone-dry laboratory interest or a kind of grab-bag of mysterious forces and tricks beginning with the subconscious and hypnotism, but as Dr. Watson so ably illustrated from his own work-shop, a stu...