Discussion

Dr. Martin's expository struggle concerning the changing images of mental health and mental disease is not to be taken seriously. If you were listening to it earnestly and hoping to hear a new formulation of disease and health that would be immediately useful to you, you are probably quite frustrated. You did not hear the usual logical categories, criteria or classifications of disease. This would be the familiar, practical ground. As Bergson has said, “Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred… The individuality of things escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it.”¹

To experience the individuality of things, in this instance Dr. Martin's paper, it is most helpful to approach it as an aesthetic representation; it is therefore not to be judged as to its usefulness and purpose, or internal finality and completeness. Rather, it is to be looked at in Schachtel's allocentric mode of perception, with a sense of wonder and mystery. This is aptly expressed by Cezanne: “The artist's will must become silent, he must silence in himself all the voices of prejudice, must forget, become quiet, a perfect echo. Nature out there and in here (he hits his forehead) must penetrate each other.”² Dr. Martin's paper penetrated into me and I into it; this experience of oneness, so characteristic of allocentric perception, was facilitated by what would ordinarily have been an exasperation. He had told me that I would get his paper in bits and snatches as he worked on it. This was annoying to my sense of order but I agreed. Then, I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed the privilege of watching his imagination at play, of seeing