is the whole significance of the group analysis1. Basing my work upon this phyletic premise, my whole endeavour has come to centre upon the effort to confront immediately the transference-image whether in the individual or in the group. With the extension of my work to fresh fields of contacts it has been interesting to observe the quick response of the patient to an attitude in myself which, far from assuming the transference to be the sine qua non of analysis, regards the transference as precisely the major barrier to the freeing of the neurotic personality.

To sum up: The transference is nothing else than the mother-image. Whether social or individual, the mother-image cannot stand as reality to the organism. It can stand as reality only to the image of oneself. For images and illusions are real only in so far as they are reciprocated by the images and illusions by which they are surrounded. In a comprehensive view of our human phylum there remains no other conclusion than that the social mind throughout comprises a systematization of social images, and that society at large is, in fact, under the thrall of an unconscious social transference.

If this finding is correct, we have not as yet taken our position half seriously, half inclusively enough. Our obligation rests upon ourselves. There is no external aid we may call in to our support. That again is the transference and the mood of dependence. And so, I hope that my position does not seem inconsistent when, in response to the very earnest and valuable questions on the part of my colleagues generally, I am compelled to refer them to the same source to which I have had to turn for the answer to these same questions, namely, to my own involvement in the social mood that underlies the psychological concepts or images with which this mood is commonly replaced. According, therefore, to the subjective finding of the laboratory or group basis, it is only by returning to the analysis of the social mood upon which our intellectualizations or social images ultimately rest that we may offset the prevalent tendency to image-transference or mood-dependence that is the unconscious basis of our social as of our individual personality.

1 Led by this prevailing misapprehension, certain of my colleagues, adopting what they have supposed to be the group method of analysis, have assumed the role of analyst to a group of people!

THE REALITY OF NERVE-ENERGY1

BY D. FRASER-HARRIS.

It is widely believed by the laity that 'nerve-energy' or 'nerve-force,' as they so often call it, is a reality.

In a leading article a writer in The Times (May 10, 1922) apropos of sleep said: "In its presence the cells of the brain are re-charged with energy."

Physiologists, Neurologists, writers on Medicine and Psychiatry all use the term freely.

The older physiologists, for instance W. B. Carpenter (1859), used the term 'nerve-force' with the same meaning as do writers of the present day; Hughlings Jackson, Weir Mitchell, Clouston and Goodheart employed it freely. None of these regarded it merely as a metaphor.

Sir William Osler wrote of "an organisation which is defective in what, for want of a better term, we must call 'nerve force'."

Sir Frederick Mott used the expression, 'innervation currents,' clearly in the same sense; and the writer of the obituary article on Mott (B.M.J. June 19, 1926) said: "His researches on...dementia praecox led him to the view that it was the expression of a failure of the vital energy of the cells of the whole body."

Dr Wanless Dickson wrote in The Practitioner (November 1924), apropos of cases of acid dyspepsia: "It might be wise to inhibit drastically the outflow of nerve-energy in these cases."

One neurologist writes: "Innervation from the cord passes...to the arterioles..."; and another: "Unusually large efferent discharges are uncontrollably released"; and once more: "the nerve-energy of the spinal cord...directed into one channel in defaecation."

The actual expression may be varied a little but the concept is the same, as when Sir Maurice Craig writes in his Nerve Exhaustion (1922): "The organism is endowed at birth with so much potential energy.'

A writer in the Psychological Review (January 1926) thus expressed himself: "The particular function of the emotions would seem to be to 1 Based on a communication to the Section of Physiology at the British Association, Oxford, August 1926.

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raise the nervous potential so that immediate and vigorous action is assured." Yet another expression, 'nervous tension,' is to be found in Dr F. G. Crookshank's Migraine and other common neuroses (1926) when he writes: "The transference of nervous tension can be easily understood." If now we turn to the writings of the physiologists, the exponents of that science which is said to underlie all the medical sciences, and search for a definition or a discussion of nerve-energy, we shall not find it. An uninitiated searcher after truth might be pardoned for thinking there was a 'conspiracy of silence' on the subject.

Of course, as the physiologists do not discuss nerve-energy, neither do they index it. The student desirous of understanding what clinicians and psychiatrists mean by 'nerve-energy' would get no help from the 'official' text-books of physiology.

Indeed, Professor McDougall, F.R.S., tells us that the physiologists "refer to it as a survival from the Dark Ages." And a still more recent writer on things neural, Dr Adrian, F.R.S., of Cambridge, declares that he would like to "banish it from our vocabulary." This is unfortunate, unless an equally useful term can be found for it, because a concept so widely employed by all sorts of writers must not be banished by any one writer.

Seeing, then, that the term is so objectionable, we might expect it to be avoided by the physiologists, but this is far from being the case. For instance, Professor Halliburton, F.R.S., wrote in Physiological Abstracts (November and December 1918, p. 419): "The introduction of the principle of a change in the quantity of nerve-energy (Hughlings Jackson) passing over a given system of conduction-paths." And Professor Starling in his Text-book (1912, p. 1211) wrote: "During the second stage (of asphyxia) there is a discharge of nerve energy which spreads throughout the whole nervous system." Professor Howell of Baltimore expressed it thus: "Physiologists have considered the cell-body of the neuron...as the source of the energy displayed by the nervous system."

As long ago as 1886 Dr (now Sir) William Hale-White introduced the term 'neuro-rheuma' not merely as the equivalent of a flow of nerveimpulses, but to denote a form of energy taking its place among other forms-light, heat, electricity, etc.

In 1903 Professor McDougall introduced the term 'neurine' for exactly the same concept.

Still more recently (1912) the late Professor B. Moore, F.R.S., then of Liverpool University, in his book, The Origin and Nature of Life (Home University Library), thus expressed himself (p. 225):

"Some term is obviously required applicable to the entirely peculiar set of energy phenomena witnessed in living matter, such as biotic energy. Heat energy and electrical energy are mutually transmutable one into the other, yet it is not said that electrical energy is heat or light because these appear when it is transformed.

"Why, then, should a form of energy such as inhabits living structures be thought to be only a mixture of heat and electricity and chemical energy, because these are observed when it manifests itself? The position. which denies the existence of a form of energy characteristic of life is one of peculiar absurdity even for the pure mechanician, which can only be explained as a natural reaction from the entirely different mediaeval conception of a 'vital force' which worked impossible miracles....

"It is biotic energy which guides the development of the ovum, which regulates the exchanges of the cell, and causes such phenomena as nerve-impulse1, muscular contraction and gland secretion, and it is a form of energy which arises in colloidal structures, just as magnetism appears in iron, or radio-activity in uranium or radium, and in its manifestations it undergoes exchanges with other forms of energy in the same manner as these do amongst one another.”

This is a candid statement of the present problem; but it involves the introduction of still another term 'biotic energy.'

Moore evidently intended the term 'biotic' to cover nerve-energy as well as the other forms of energy in the living organism, so that it is more inclusive than a mere synonym for 'nerve-energy' would be.

Might I suggest 'neuronic energy' as a non-committal term for nerveenergy?

Things are thus so chaotic, that it might not be, as it were, unprofitable to go back to the beginning and ask ourselves what we really know of manifestations of energy in nerve-fibres and in nerve-cells 2.

In neurones we find nothing but nerve-impulses; or, to be more exact, we infer the existence of nerve-impulses from the propagated recurring disturbances of electric potential when the nerve is stimulated. In efferent nerve-fibres, impulses in series are descending from the trophic cells to the periphery; in afferent fibres, impulses in series are ascending from end-organs to 'cells.'

Quite recently we have learned something about the frequency of these impulses in the efferent fibres, namely, that they are of the order of 50 to 70 a second; "these regular action-currents represent the proper

1 Italics are mine. D. F.-H.

* This expression here means the nucleated 'body' of the neurone.

rhythm of the motor spinal neurones free from the various centripeta influences1."

Still more recently Dr Adrian has shown that in the sensory nervefibres of muscle when they are stimulated normally (by tension), the impulses have a frequency of from 21 to 33 a second.

Increase of intensity of stimulus increases the frequency not the magnitude of the response (impulse), which follows from the 'all or nothing' behaviour of the nerve-fibre. Thus, an eight-fold increase of stimulus gave no increase in the size of the response. From a muscle practically at rest, that is subjected to no tension, impulses at three to eight a second were still ascending the related afferent nerve.

In other words, in consequence of the 'all or nothing' law an impulse, if aroused at all, in a nerve, is maximal.

In the light of these things what meaning can we attach to 'feeble' or 'powerful' innervation in the case, say, of a musculo-motor nerve? For there must be a difference between someone gently tapping on my chamber door and a maniac hammering in the panels, between the gentle innervation of calm inspiration and the spasms of asphyxia.

The feeble innervation of a muscle can only mean that less than all its fibres are thrown into activity because less than all its neurones are in activity. And a more powerful innervation must mean that more or all of the muscle fibres are active because more or all of the neurones are in activity. Apparently, also, the frequency of the rhythm of the descending impulses has increased.

Fatigue of centres, of nerve-cells, must be a reality; neurasthenia is a reality. A person can overcome extreme fatigue, can hold out against it. A weak woman can do marvels muscularly to save her child from the burning house; is she not manifesting nerve-energy?

Strychnine surely liberates something when it 'stimulates' centres. Again, inhibition within the central nervous system is a reality. Even if certain forms of inhibition are to be regarded as due to interference of nerve-impulses at synapses, there must be energy available for the restraint.

The energy of the impulses which can inhibit the centre which maintains the tone of the sphincter vesicae-whether the inhibiting impulses be of reflex or of central origin-must be real.

Neuro-dynamogenesis is a reality.

We seem ready for a definition.

In response to a letter of mine in Nature (1922), Dr Adrian defined

1 de Barenne and Brevée of Utrecht. Journ. of Phys. LXI, No.1, March 1926.