ABSTRACT
KANT and Wundt had emphasized the descriptive function oftypology. At the beginning of the modern period stand three writers who emphasized more the causal factors involved. The first, and probably the most important of these three, is the Austrian psychiatrist Otto Gross, whose two books on Die Zerebrale Sekundaerfunktion (1902), and Ueber Psychopathologische Minderwertigkeiten (1909), introduced the concepts of 'primary' and 'secondary' function. These concepts are basically physiological, although the physiology in question is, in part at least, mythological; the concepts refer respectively to the hypothetical activity of the brain cells during the production of any form of mental content, and to the hypothetical perseveration of the nervous processes involved in this production. Thus a nervous process that succeeds in rousing an idea in the mind is supposed to perseverate, although not at a conscious level, and to determine the subsequent associations formed by the mind .! Gross also postulated a correlation between the intensity of any experience and the tendency for that experience to persist secondarily and to deterrnine the subsequent course of mental associations. Most intense and energy consuming in his view were highly affective and emotional experiences and ideas, and these would therefore be followed by a long secondary function during which the mental content would be influenced and in part determined by the perseverative effects of the primary function. There is of course an obvious sirnilarity between the concept of 'secondary function ' and that of 'refractory period', Gross distinguishes two contrasted types which he labels 'deep-narrow' and 'shallow-broad'. 1 Perseveration, as conceived by Gross, is similar in nature to the concept of 'consolidation' which has in recent years acquired excellent experimental support, A review of this work, and its application to personality differences, is given in Eysenck (1967).
