An Endocrine Approach to Psychodynamics

As Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer has pointed out, the development of endocrinology in recent decades has added an entirely new principle to physiology. The most superficial consideration of the effect of depriving the individual of any essential hormone is sufficient to bring sharply into focus the fact that physiology minus the hormones is not physiology at all. In so far then as one honestly repudiates the mind-body disjunction he must concede an important rôle to the hormones as determinants of personality. It is, however, unfortunately true that competent psychologists have been little attracted to endocrinology as a field for serious work and that endocrinologists have shied away from the intangibilities of psychology. The result is that one of the fundamentally important chapters of endocrinology remains yet largely to be written.

When the endocrinologist seriously turns his attention to personality he is led at once to a consideration of psychodynamics and thus to the formulations of the freudian school. He finds a special psychoanalytic terminology for phenomena with which he too is familiar and in which he has a necessary interest. The endocrinologist deals with actual input and transformations of energy whereas the psychoanalyst is concerned primarily with energy distributions. Thus the dynamic