258

Chapter 15

bad intention of its practitioners, what can be explained from their intentions and

what from this intention itself should, on the contrary, be explained on the basis

of the objective tendencies operative behind the backs of these practitioners. Of

course, the particularities of his personal creativity and the entire weight of his

scientific experience determined the specific form of universalism which the idea

of reflexology acquired in the hands of Bekhterev. But in Pavlov [1928/1963, p. 41]

as well, whose personal contribution and scientific experience are entirely different,

reflexology is the “ultimate science,” “an omnipotent method,” which brings “full,

true and permanent human happiness.” And in their own way behaviorism and

Gestalt theory cover the same route. Obviously, rather than the mosaic of good

and evil intentions among the investigators we should study the unity in the proc-

esses of regeneration of scientific tissue in psychology, which determines the inten-

tion of all the investigators.

7

Precisely what the dependency of each psychological operation upon the gen-

eral formula means can be illustrated with any problem that transcends the bounda-

ries of the special discipline that raised it.

When Lipps [1897, p. 146] says about the unconscious that it is less a psycho-

logical problem than the problem for psychology, he has in mind that the uncon-

scious is a problem of general psychology. By this he wished to say, of course, no

more than that this question will be answered not as a result of this or that par-

ticular investigation, but as a result of a fundamental investigation by means of the

general science, i.e., by comparing the widely varying data of the most heteroge-

neous areas of science; by correlating the given problem with several of the basic

premises of scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and with several of the most

general results of all sciences, on the other; by finding a place for this concept in

the system of the basic concepts of psychology; by a fundamental dialectical analysis

of the nature of this concept and the features of being that it corresponds to and

reflects. This investigation logically precedes any concrete investigation of particular

questions of subconscious life and determines the very formulation of the problem

in such investigations.

As MUnsterberg [1920, p. v], defending the need for such an investigation for

another set of problems, splendidly put it: “In the end it is better to get an ap-

proximately exact preliminary answer to a question that is stated correctly than to

answer with a precision to the last decimal point a question that is stated inaccu-

rately.” A correct statement of a question is no less a matter of scientific creativity

and investigation than a correct answer—and it is much more crucial. The vast

majority of contemporary psychological investigations write out the last decimal

point with great care and precision in answer to a question that is stated funda-

mentally incorrectly.

Whether we accept with MUnsterberg [1920, pp. 158-163] that the subconscious

is simply physiological and not psychological; or whether we agree with others that

the subconscious consists of phenomena that temporarily are absent from conscious-

ness, like the whole mass of potentially conscious reminiscences, knowledge and

habits; whether we call those phenomena subconscious that do not reach the thresh-

old of consciousness, or those of which we are minimally conscious, which are pe-

ripheral in the field of consciousness, automatic and unnoted; whether we find a

suppression of the sexual drive to be the basis of the subconscious, like Freud, or