The Crisis in Psychology

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recreated the situation in which these complexes were originally established. And

the experiment succeeded. I consider the methodological technique at the basis of

this experiment to be an example of the right approach to Freud’s theme and to

claims by others in general. Let us try to describe this technique. First of all, the

problem was raised in the course of Pavlov’s own investigations of the nature of

internal inhibition. The task was framed, formulated, and understood in the light

of his principles. The theoretical theme of the experimental work and its signifi-

cance were conceived of in the concepts of Pavlov’s school. We know what a trace

reflex is and we also know what an actual reflex is. To transform the one into the

other means to banish inhibition etc., i.e., the whole mechanism of the process we

understand in entirely specific and homogeneous categories. The value of the anal-

ogy with catharsis was merely heuristic: it shortened the path of Pavlov’s experi-

ments and led to the goal in the shortest way possible. But it was only accepted

as an assumption that was immediately verified experimentally. And after the so-

lution of his own task the author came to the third and final conclusion that the

phenomena described by Freud can be experimentally tested upon animals and

should be analyzed in more detail via the method of conditional salivary reflexes.

lb verify Freud via Pavlov’s ideas is totally different from verifying them via

his own ideas; and this possibility as well was established not through analysis, but

through the experiment. What is most important is that the author, when confronted

with phenomena analogous to those described by Freud’s school, did not for one

moment step onto foreign territory, did not rely on other people’s data, but used

them to carry through his own investigation. Pavlov’s discovery has its significance,

value, place and meaning in his own system, not in Freud’s. The two circles touch

at the point of intersection of both systems, the point where they meet, and this

one point belongs to both at the same time. But its place, sense and value is de-

termined by its position in the first system. A new discovery was made in this in-

vestigation, a new fact was found, a new trait was studied—but it was all in the

[framework of the] theory of conditional reflexes and not in psychoanalysis. In this

way each “almost miraculous” coincidence disappeared!

One has only to compare this with the purely verbal way Bekhterev [1932, p.

413] comes to a similar evaluation of the idea of catharsis for the system of re-

flexology, to see the deep difference between these two procedures. Here the in-

terrelation of the two systems is also first of all based on catharsis, i.e.,

discharge of a ‘strangulated’ affect or an inhibited mimetic-somatic impulse. Is not this

the discharge of a reflex which, when inhibited, oppresses the personality, shackles and

diseases it, while, when there is discharge of the reflex (catharsis), naturally the

pathological condition disappears? Is not the weeping out of a sorrow the discharge

of an impeded reflex?

Here every word is a pearl. A mimetic-somatic impulse—what can be more

clear or precise? Avoiding the language of subjective psychology, Bekbterev is not

squeamish about philistine language, which hardly makes Freud’s term any clearer.

How did this inhibited reflex “oppress” the personality, shackle it? Why is the wept-

out sorrow the discharge of an inhibited reflex? What if a person weeps in the very

moment of sorrow? Finally, elsewhere it is claimed that thought is an inhibited

reflex, that concentration is connected with the inhibition of a nervous current and

is accompanied by conscious phenomena. Oh salutary inhibition! It explains con-

scious phenomena in one chapter and unconscious ones in the next!

All this clearly indicates the theme with which we started this section: in the

problem of the unconscious one must distinguish between a methodological and

an empirical problem, i.e., between a psychological problem and the problem for

psychology. [30] The uncritical combination of both problems leads to a gross dis-