ABSTRACT
After what has been said about psychological methods above, it will be understood why a leading psychiatrist, O. Bumke, believes that he can find more points of contact with the ‘humanistic’ psychology of E. Spranger, who is of the Dilthey school, than with experimental psychology, which, he thinks, has reached the limits of its usefulness. 2 The psychiatrist, like the exponent of ‘humanistic’ psychology, is always concerned with an individual as a whole, and with different human types, which emerge under such a treatment. Certain deficiencies of experimental psychology, which clung to it in the beginning when its methods were still to a large extent modelled on those of the inorganic sciences, would therefore be noticed most by him. Such deficiencies, from his point of view, would be the ‘prejudice of uniformity,’ which overlooked all typical differences; the lack of any tendency to take account of the whole personality; the over-emphasis of the physiology of the senses; the ‘physicalism’ of overhastily drawn-up theories, whose ideal seemed at one time to be a mechanics of psychic elements; the ‘intellectualism’ of these theories, which only takes account of those aspects of psychic events that are most amenable to such ‘physicalistic’ treatment, and in doing so overlooks those aspects of personality, which seem to the psychiatrist and to the humanistic psychologist the ones that really determine psychic events, and therefore the most important. Although we must admit these objections, as far as they are concerned with the initial stages of our science, we must, nevertheless, bear in mind the following in defence of the psychology which starts from the side of the natural sciences: these objections are no longer wholly true in respect of the psychology of the present day. We know for certain that Spranger himself is convinced that the time has passed in which the two forms of psychology are strictly opposed to one another, and that a closer co-operation is being established. As a matter of fact some psychiatrists occasionally advise psychology to proceed in precisely the opposite direction, to work even more strictly and exclusively as a natural science. Only then, they think, will its service to the more clinical branches of science become clearly visible. Thus Bleuler, the master of schizophrenic research, once wrote me a very temperamental letter to the effect that the psychological researches being carried out here were “pure natural science”; we ought fully to admit this and keep them strictly free from philosophic or humanistic (geisteswissenschaftliche) lines of thought, which had for so long prevented the development of psychology into a science.
