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 author approaches the subject of abnormal psychology as a 'scientific student of mind as a natural phenomenon. … From this point of view the concepts are as important as the patients or individuals to whom they apply. … Perhaps it can be hoped that if attendance upon the psychopathic equips one for the report of cases and the discussion of therapy, the account of concepts can be safely undertaken by one chiefly; occupied with them' (p. vi.).
Two interesting but highly questionable assumptions are clearly implicit in this approach: One that the therapist has not shewn himself competent to systematize his own material. The other that the outside thinker, not immersed in that living work from which concepts arise, is competent to order and evaluate them. Hollingworth claims for himself as an outside thinker the right and the ability to select and reject, and he illustrates this by the play he makes with the conclusions of Freud, Janet and other workers. This scene-shifting of ideas is held to be more 'scientific' than the work of the clinician and therapist, apparently just because the various notions examined are not born from the author's