The Crisis in Psychology

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our second ego, a special personality; finally, whether we call these phenomena un-,

sub-, or superconscious, or like Stern accept all of these terms—it all fundamentally

changes the character, quantity, composition, nature, and properties of the material

which we will study. The question partially predetermines the answer.

It is this feeling of a system, the sense of a [common] style, the understanding

that each particular statement is linked with and dependent upon the central idea

of the whole system of which it forms a part, which is absent in the essentially

eclectic attempts at combining the parts of two or more systems that are hetero-

geneous and diverse in scientific origin and composition. Such are, for instance,

the synthesis of behaviorism and Freudian theory in the American literature; Freu-

dian theory without Freud in the systems of Adler and Jung; the reflexological Freu-

dian theory of Bekhterev and Zalkind; finally, the attempts to combine Freudian

theory and Marxism (Luria, 1925; Fridman, 1925). So many examples from the area

of the problem of the subconscious alone! In all these attempts the tail of one

system is taken and placed against the head of another and the space between

them is filled with the trunk of a third. It isn’t that they are incorrect, these mon-

strous combinations, they are correct to the last decimal point, but the question

they wish to answer is stated incorrectly. We can multiply the number of citizens

of Paraguay with the number of kilometers from the earth to the sun and divide

the product by the average life span of the elephant and carry out the whole op-

eration irreproachably, without a mistake in any number, and nevertheless the final

outcome might mislead someone who is interested in the national income of this

country. What the eclectics do, is to reply to a question raised by Marxist philosophy

with an answer prompted by Freudian metapsychology.

In order to show the methodological illegitimacy of such attempts, we will first

dwell upon three types of combining incompatible questions and answers, without

2 thinking for one moment that these three types exhaust the variety of such attempts.

The first way in which any school assimilates the scientific products of another

area consists of the direct transposition of all laws, facts, theories, ideas etc., the

usurpation of a more or less broad area occupied by other investigators, the an-

nexation of foreign territory. Such a politics of direct usurpation is common for

each new scientific system which spreads its influence to adjacent disciplines and

lays claim to the leading role of a general science. Its own material is insufficient

and after just a little critical work such a system absorbs foreign bodies, submits

•

them, filling the emptiness of its inflated boundaries. Usually one gets a conglom-

crate of scientific theories, facts, etc. which have been squeezed into the framework

of the unifying idea with horrible arbitrariness.

Such is the system of Bekhterev’s reflexology. He can use anything: even•

Vvedensky’s theory about the unknowabiity of the external ego, i.e., an extreme

expression of solipsism and idealism in psychology, provided that this theory clearly

confirms his particular claim about the need for an objective method. [13] That it

breaches the general sense of the whole system, that it undermines the foundations

of the realistic approach to personality does not matter to this author (we observe

that Vvedensky, too, fortifies himself and his theory with a reference to the work

of.. . Pavlov, without understanding that by turning for help to a system of objective

psychology he extends a hand to his grave-digger). But for the methodologist it is

highly significant that such antipodes as Vvedensky-Pavlov and Bekhterev—Vveden-

I:

sky do not merely contradict each other, but necessarily presuppose each other’s

existence and view the coincidence of theft conclusions as evidence for “the rei-

ability of these conclusions.” For this third person [the methodologist, Russian eds.]

it is clear that we are not dealing here with a coincidence of conclusions which

were reached fully independently by representatives of different specialties, for cx-