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This book is the first publication of David Rapaport's doctoral dissertation which was submitted in 1938 to the faculty of the University of Budapest. In his preface, Solomon Asch states: 'Those who are
not inclined to dismiss past ideas as outmoded will make a number of unexpected discoveries'. These discoveries lie in both the organization and content of this book. Taking the writings of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant—Rapaport brings into focus their conceptions of associations as these relate to epistemology. Although developed during the 'prehistory' of scientific psychology, these attempts to comprehend how man thinks, what constitutes true knowledge, and how knowledge is arrived at bear significantly upon later considerations of thinking.
Associations are variously seen as sources of error, as determiners of mental processes, as atomistic and mechanistic, as dynamic, as a function of unconscious processes, as a method of imagining, and as categories of a priori synthetic propositions. Rapaport's dissertation provides the reader with an important and informative background for contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis. The place of motivation and the impact of intentions and desires upon associations are shown to have antecedents in the thinking of these philosophers. The struggles over the relationships between mind and body, between metaphysics and empiricism, between scepticism and intuition are laid out here as they relate to the formation, significance, and nature of associations. Many of these struggles are present in current controversies. Questions which were alive then are still very much with us: whether the roots of knowledge lie in the biological or in the psychological realm, whether associations afford us veridical knowledge or unstable and distorted information, and whether associations are formed in a mechanistic manner or wh