You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The reissue of Kurt Goldstein's The Organism in paperback makes one realize how “undated” this original work is, how relevant it continues to be for a scientific methodology in the natural sciences, as well as the humanities. Moreover, its holistic approach has far-reaching import for a modification of topographical metapsychology.
In his Preface to the present edition, Goldstein calls attention to certain shifts in his emphasis and formulation since the book was first published in 1939. (See his essays “Concerning the Concept of Primitivity in Culture and History,” in Essay in Honor of Paul Radin, Columbia University Press, and “The Smiling of an Infant and the Problem of Understanding the Other” in Journal of Psychology 44: 175-191, 1957).
In The Organism, the concept of the concrete-abstract attitude stresses the application of reasoning. Later, Goldstein introduced another term—“the sphere of immediacy.” This is governed by laws which go beyond the logical reasoning of “natural science.” As Goldstein puts it in the Preface to this edition, this sphere “creates a deeper existence which affords not only the possibility of living in the static condition of the abstract-concrete sphere, but also of tolerating uncertainty without losing our existence.”
The perennial contribution of Goldstein's work is a methodology which transcends the traditional division between “empirical research” and “metaphysical reasoning,” bringing “the prototype” into view from which both can be understood. At the same time, it insists that this over-all perspective itself can be gotten at only by the method of empirical observation and investigation. Basic to his theory is the conviction that “a state of greater perfection can never be understood from that of less perfection, and that only the converse is possible.” The implications of this thesis for metapsychological theory and for the application of psychoanalysis are of enormous moment.