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 of this monograph has with great scholarship collected an overwhelming number of facts, experimental data, theories and speculations from the vast literature of physiology, experimental and theoretical psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry. In addition to this valuable survey of the literature, which brings together in one volume many different schools of thought, the author undertakes to contribute his own theory for a solution of the problem as to where to place the concepts of emotion and memory in a general system of psychological functions. His ability to think himself into different schools of thought (except the physiological) provides him with a springboard for a remarkable approach. He accepts Freud's concept of drives as the basic psychological force and assumes that when these lead to an unconscious conflict they find discharge through channels other than voluntary activity such as (1) 'emotional expression', (2) 'emotion felt'; through subjective emotional experiences which include not only the 'genuine' emotions described in textbooks (rage, fear) but a 'hierarchy' of emotions ranging from those which are mild, conventionalized, and intellectualized, to the most intensive and primitive (p. 37, and pp. 101, ff.). Memory is not a storehouse of deposited engrams but the 'stratification of a multiplicity of dynamic fields in which every experience enters into relations with the related experiences on the varied levels of stratification. Thus there is no dividing line between memory and thinking: the same stratifying connecting and organizing influences [the emotional factors] which are active in thinking are at work in the memory organization; and this … makes memory one … aspect of the organization of thought processes' (p. 102).
The author's assumption that thinking and memory are kindred