fails to keep distinct these two spheres his mood experience and his thought experience-and this subjective confusion renders his processes definitely inconsistent. For in the study of psychiatry or of the reactions that are internal to man, the presumable sphere of observation is clouded throughout by the internal feelings and reactions comprising our own subjective states. And in the absence of a social consensus with its established symbol consistency we merely preserve the casual and uncodified mode of our habitual and subjective experience. In this view the study of man's subjective states is precluded through man's own involvement in his habitual subjective interpretations. He does not permit himself a consistency of observation based upon a conceptual consensus with its correspondingly accepted symbol equivalents. The result is that psychiatry and psychoanalysis fail to apprehend the objective materials proper to them. They represent unconscious artistry but not scientific observation.

With this requisite factor of a consensual basis of observation there will be secured to psychiatry the condition that is recognized as essential to all objective inquiry-the condition, namely, which provides that the substance or process to be examined shall come under direct observation and study. As every student knows, it is essential that the substance or process submitted to scientific examination shall be presented for immediate observation. No mere report about a substance can for a moment be countenanced in a scientific laboratory. No element in the analysis may under any circumstance be taken for granted or accepted on hearsay, but each step in the process must be actually presented for direct observation. In a word, the examination must occupy itself with immediate material. But psychiatry does not present immediate material for direct observation because it does not possess as yet a basis of consensual agreement among the observers as to what constitutes its immediate material.

It is conceded that the first condition of observation within the objective laboratory of science is the presentation of actual material and that the criteria of accurate observation presuppose a common basis of sense perception among the laboratory observers. In the biological laboratory we do not accept any second-hand description as to the nature of a tissue presumably under examination, but the tissue itself must be directly submitted for actual examination, and for this it is further provided that there shall exist a consensus of sense impressions among

the several observers.

I think it must become clear that within the mental sphere or in

psychiatry there is an absence of both of these conditions requisite to scientific inquiry. There is not the immediacy of the material or condition necessary for examination, nor is there the continuity or perceptual consensus among the examiners. In psychiatry we depend upon the report of the patient or upon his family or friends for our knowledge as to his condition or feeling or for our objective material. The patient or his family or his friends tell us about the materials or reactions he presents. Such a procedure may have its value historically and philosophically but it is not scientific examination. It cannot be included among the processes of laboratory inquiry. As regards the neural consensus requisite to the determination of the condition under examination, no patient presents his emotions for immediate examination but, due to the covenant of social repression existing between himself and his examiner, he carefully guards his direct emotional expression and prudently discourses about what he conceives this emotion to be. He presents the material of his dreams, his childhood reminiscences and endless free associations, but his emotional feeling in the immediate moment escapes direct observation. The patient's actual feeling therefore is not submitted to direct scientific observation because of the subjective and internal states. that obscure it. Or if he presents feeling at all, it is necessarily confused by reason of the subjective feeling of his examiner. Consider, for example, the patient who in his gentle bearing or demeanour brings up to one psychoanalyst the tender feelings associated with this analyst's mother. The same patient may offer a very different stimulus to the psychoanalyst to whom the patient's appearance or character recalls at once the feelings associated with this analyst's dominating and overbearing father. In other words, the same patient may stimulate in one psychiatrist the psychiatrist's mother complex and in another the father complex. Or he may in the same psychiatrist stimulate at one time the psychiatrist's father identification and at another his mother identification, with the result that the psychiatrist necessarily reacts in an entirely different manner under these two different conditions of so-called observation. Yet this reaction is called judgment or analysis. But "there needs no ghost come from the grave" to tell us that the patient who seeks the aid of the psychopathologist for his condition cannot obtain from him a consistent observation. Were it so, it would not be the very general custom of patients to go about from one psychoanalyst to another because they find a satisfactory and vicarious solace in the totally different interpretations of their several analysts. Nor would it be the unfailing practice among psychopathologists, whenever two meet privately together, to

criticize as inadequate the methods and results characteristic of a third psychiatrist. Such disparities in our analytic interpretations could not exist were there a consensual agreement of subjective states or common terms in relation to the material under analytic observation. If the psychoanalyst is not socially free from the limitations of the social repression, he cannot make a free and unrepressed observation of the socially repressed individual opposite him.

The idea that I should like to place uppermost is this. If there is a social consensus of repression, there cannot be a social consensus of observation. If in our individual minds there are repressed and private terms of interpretation, there cannot exist in the social mind mutually agreed and commonly accepted terms of observation. I cannot accept a social agreement in terms with respect to the evidences of emotional conflict in a patient unless I have accepted these same terms with respect to emotional conflict within myself. If my analysis and observation of myself lack social co-ordination-if I have not a pragmatic basis of organic symbol agreement in the observation of my own emotions and repressions I cannot possibly bring the requisite basis of concurrence to the observation of others whose organic gestures of emotion and repression are identical with my own.

According to prevailing clinical methods, psychiatry is dependent, in what it calls its scientific judgment, upon quite whimsical reactions that are wholly unpredictable and beyond the control of a socially consensual basis of objective agreement. In view of this quite unconscious situation in the sphere of our subjective determinations it seems to me imperative that we secure conditions for a definite laboratory technique in the observation of the material presented by our psychiatric patients. There is definitely requisite a social consensus of observers-observers who are consensually preserved against the private interpretations of their private complexes and who accordingly possess a scientific basis of conscious recognition of the data under examination. There will thus be demanded the presentation of fresh and actual material and not any second-hand report of the material as recorded either by the patient himself or by his friends. Emotions that are to be recognized and studied must be demonstrated, and in order that they be demonstrated they must secure conditions of observation which preclude the private prejudices of the particular observer. In short, it is required in the subjective sphere no less than in the objective that we be presented with immediate data of laboratory observation and that our conditions of observation. shall provide such controls as afford a consensual consistency or give

social continuity of interpretation dependent upon the social sense perceptions shared among the observers in question.

As a result of the group analysis with which I have in the last years been constantly occupied, it has been my experience that only the authority of a social consensus of receptive sense impressions is adequate for the unbiased observation of complexes in which we are all socially participants. The private interpretation of the individual psychiatrist or analyst is not competent to envisage the private position on which the individual neurosis bases its support. This private basis of outlook represents but the casual and uncodified mood-interpretation based upon social images that involve the physician no less than the patient. In the subjective involvement of each within this habitual image-sphere there is absent the condition of observation requisite to scientific inquiry. In the failure of psychiatry or of psychoanalysis to recognize its own involvement in a social mood-consensus, there is precluded the possibility of a thought-consensus such as may place this social mood-reaction among the materials of objective investigation. We are deceived in thinking that we can escape this habitual mood-involvement in the absence of an analytic challenge of our own social mood. Under our present social system of mood-evaluations the dilemma of the neurotic patient lies in the circumstance that his individual unconscious finds ready support in an equally unconscious social mood which the psychiatrist shares with him. When through the analysis of this social moodinvolvement psychiatrists shall present a consensus of impressions based upon a consensually codified experience, psychiatry need no longer be the interpreter of private hearsay and report but the observer of actual material based upon a social agreement of organic sense perceptions. In this common consensual viewpoint the data of psychiatry will take their rightful place among the materials of an objective science.

There is the definite need of a psychiatric laboratory for the investigation of our human processes. In the modest beginnings of such an attempt on the part of my associates and myself there is clearly the promise of a saner basis of outlook not only for the individual patient but for the students of mental disorders whose function it is to relieve these sick and oppressed mental states as they occur both in the individual and in the social system of which our students and ourselves are also a part.

SOME CLINICAL ASPECTS OF CERTAIN EMOTIONS

BY DONALD E. CORE

THE object of the present paper is in the main twofold; to endeavour to correlate certain psychical phenomena with groups of clinical symptoms and, to assess as far as may be possible the biological value of the functional nervous disorders.

Since the time of Charcot investigation into these disorders has been concerned largely with the different emotions presumed to be operative in their formation; Dejerine laid the necessary stress on the importance of the emotions in this connexion and the majority of modern work has been directed to the different tones and their relative values. A certain degree of divergence of opinion has resulted and this has reflected upon current ideas of treatment and, of necessity, upon their classification also.

An emotional tone, being an integral part of an instinctive activity, may be considered as an index of the reaction of an organism to its surroundings. Two possibilities arise for consideration out of this relationship; the organism may either be in harmony with its surroundings or it may not; it may be in a state of discord. We should then at the very outset be justified in assuming that emotionalism, however amenable it may be to further and more detailed subdivisions, will be apparent as a characteristic of an animal in one or other of these states. Also, whereas an animal is occasionally terrified, occasionally angry, occasionally parental, it is always either in accordance with its environment or at variance with it, and this fact would appear to have an important bearing in the genesis of certain clinical states. The detailed subdivision of the different emotional tones has a positive value as far as social science is concerned, but from the clinical point of view it probably has no such value; whereas the recognition of the dual aspect of emotionalism has a clinical importance that is difficult to overestimate.

Quite apart from clinical medicine this duality is obvious and it is emphasised by a very superficial study of an animal under the influence. of representative emotions. It is almost unnecessary to dwell upon well recognised facts in a paper of this description, but for the sake of completeness it may be pointed out, that, if we take as types the affective states associated on the one hand with behaviour proper to reproduction and