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.
After summarizing the debt which psychology owes to W. Wundt M. N. Banerji proceeds to shew how enormously the whole outlook and endeavour of psychology has expanded and altered in the last years. The sheet anchor of Wundt's definition of psychology was consciousness, but Freud's work has demonstrated the 'overwhelming importance and dynamic character' of the unconscious and has made the equation of mind with consciousness forever impossible. Freud also 'established determinism in the field of wishes'. The Gestalt school has done service in correcting the one-sided aim of official Experimental Psychology. Practical work has been done by the application of Intelligence Tests for the ascertaining of mental deficiency. The criterion has been 'the quantum of performance'. From the purely objective standpoint we have the epoch-making work of Pavlov and also the researches of the Behaviourists which 'should be credited with the service of bringing to the fore again the question of physical basis for mentation'. The scientist of to-day believes in 'no mind that is … separated from the body' and daily proves the close relationship between mind and body, e.g. in the use of anti-syphilitic measures in certain forms of psychosis and in the study of the endocrine glands, with regard to mentally disturbed states; while psycho-analysis and other psycho-therapies have proved that in shell-shock cases functions of the body and mind are influenced by the sense organs. Freud's psycho-analytical method shewed the possibility of proceeding along purely. mental lines in dealing with the psycho-neurosis.
There then follows a discussion of parallelism which ends with its rejection. The four outstanding schools of psychology to-day are: (1) those who study only physiology and behaviour. (2) Those who proceed by analysis of consciousness by purely psychological and experimental lines. These are the parallelists. (3) Those who study both physiology and consciousness, the unconsc