MENTAL ABNORMALITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23224, 23 June 1937, Page 13

MENTAL ABNORMALITY

ADDRESS TO PHILOSOPHICAL CLUB

"A Suggested Theory of Mental Abnormality " was the title of an interesting and original address to the Dunodin Philosophical Club by Mr F. W. Guest. The object of the paper was to examine the applicability of the concepts of the " Gestalt" psychologists to the phenomena of mental disorder.

The major concepts of the " Gestalt " psychologists were denoted by the terms "Gestalt," "insight" and "closure." A " Gestalt" was the term given to an organised whole or pattern of experience, the essential attribute of which was that the psychological quality of the whole was different from the sum of the psychological qualities of the parts. The term " configuration " had been widely used to translate the term " Gestalt." The separate parts of such a whole or configuration were dynamically related to one another The presence of one part affected the " meaning " of the other parts, and indeed, its presence was part of their meaning. A simple example of this could be taken from Kohler's experiments with apes. A slick which might have no meaning for an ape would acquire a meaning when it was seen as part of a situation which contained a banana. It then became "something-to-reach-the-banana-with." The total situation, including not only the spatial and temporal relations, but also the motive, controlled the meaning of any given aspect of the situation. Thus by "meaning" the Gestalt psychologists denoted functional value. " Closure " was the term applied by Wertheimer, Kofflea and Kohler to the tendency of organisms to move towards a state of equilibrium. A simple example from the visual field was our tendency to react to parts of things as if they were wholes. Another illustration could be taken from Kohler's experiments with apes. He had found that at first the apes could grasp the relation between the banana and the stick only when they had been seen as part of the same visual field. Later, however, on seeing a stick in a remote part of the cage it would use the stick as a tool; and on seeing the banana outside the cage it would look for a stick. In other words, when once the functional values of objects in a situation had been grasped, the appearance of one of the objects tended to reinstate the whole situation. Once a configuration had been formed the appearance of any one part of it tended to reproduce the whole. "Insight" was the apprehension of the relevant relations between things. It was the grasping of the total situation so that each particular part of the situation had a functional value within it. It was the capacity of the organism to apprehend functional rela- | tions. and to form configurations. Insight was essential to learning, which consisted in a progressive organisation of experience into configurations. It had been shown, Mr Guest con- ! tinued, that a configuration once I acquired tended to become permanent; I and any part of it when presented tended to reproduce the whole. It was I clear, however, that with increased exI perience. and in situations of richer i content, relations which had at first I been apprehended as fundamental became less fundamental. It was necessary for the field to be organised differently so that the organism might achieve equilibrium more easily and more adequately. Again, it was only in certain limited fields of experience that the same situations occurred again in exactly the same way, and the original reaction had to be modified to meet the new situation. These modifications of acquired configurations were caused by increased insight. Such changing and developing and discarding of configurations was the groundwork of learning and progression. It involved, however, a definite conflict : with the tendency of configurations, once formed, to become permanent. The past existed for us as a vast number of interconnected and overlapping configurations, of acquired functional values or meanings, of tendencies to react in certain more or less definite ways in certain more or less definite situations. Our present behaviour was largely determined by our past experience. To transfer something learnt in one situation, i.e.. something which had become part of a configuration, into another configuration, was a relatively high-grade ac- . complishment. Similarly, to look at the same thing from the opposite side, to exclude from an acquired configuration something which was not relevant to the present situation, was a relatively high-grade accomplishment. We learnt by insight, but, having learnt, our insight tended to be retarded by the previous learning. The past, as it were, acted as an opaque glass between us and the future, so that the perfection of our insight, our ability to see new relations and new meanings, was dimmed. . „ , ... , It was almost universally admitted by psychologists that some kind of conflict was at the basis of all mental disorders which were purely psychological in origin. The speaker suggested that the conflict might be sought he did not say found, in the conflicting tendencies of configuration and insight, the one tending to maintain itself and to control future action, the other tending to see more useful and more fundamental relations in situations. He suggested, also, as a corollary, that what was called dissociation was the process by which one configuration, or part of one, lost its functional value within a certain field. It was the process by which one configuration which was more strongly organised, more firmly integrated, than another, prevented that other from affecting the present situation by excluding it from consciousness. It was one of the processes by which incompatibility of configuration was solved. Suggestion might also be conceived as one of the processes by which a stronger con figuration prevented a weaker one from acting. , . Mr Guest proceeded to show how i certain classic cases of phobias, taken ! from the works of Rivers and ur i Ernest Jones, could be interpreted in terms of closure, configuration, and insight He stressed the point that in these cases it was not necessary to postulate an independent active •'unconscious" for their explanation. He did not deny that the forgotten past of individuals had an effect on their present behaviour: but suggested that it was not necessary to assume that there was a reactivisation of the forgotten incident, or that the forgotten incident itself acted independently in producing effects in our conscious life. His examination of the contextual character of configurations had shown that part of an original stimulus could produce Hie whole of the previous reaction. This theory left no room to suggest that the reaction was not a direel result of the stimulus or first configuration It was not necessary to postulate a middle step in which (he first stimulus aroused the repressed or forgotten incident, and the repressed content produced the reaction. This line of explanation overlooked the contextual or pattern-like quality of experience, and saw a series fo temporally related incidents instead of a single pattern. Mr Guest went on to suggest how Freud's theory of the ambivalence of emotion, anxiety-neuroses, and the phenomenon of rationalisation, could be explained in configurational terms; and concluded by answering various objections to his theory which had occurred to him. His paper was followed by a particularly lively and interesting discussion.