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“Psychoanalysis is as important for the understanding of the construction of the psyche as dissection is for the understanding of the structure of the body, or chemical analysis for the understanding of the constitution of the molecule.”—S. E. Jelliffe and W. A. White, Diseases of the Nervous System, 2d ed., Philadelphia, 1917, p. 20.
We are witnessing a radical reform in the clinical and doctrinal ideals of mental medicine; we behold the dawn of what may be called agnostic psychiatry. The followers of this psychiatry, brought to a realization that it is impossible to attribute active values to non-psychic processes, have chosen a new point of departure looking toward the establishment of a scientific era for mental pathology.
Although the new psychiatry, in the method adopted and the results attained, differs fundamentally from the psychiatry which it is replacing, it is still not absolutely new, being to a certain extent but a return to an earlier form of the science of mental phenomena. The idea upon which it is founded can be traced, indeed, to the very infancy of psychiatry, so that, at the beginning, the agnostic tendency seems to have been due to nothing more than a fortunate conjecture. Ph. Pinel was the pioneer in the new direction and first turned psychiatry into the paths of psychological interpretation. Those who came after him, however, influenced, doubtless, by the great discoveries of their epoch, in physical science, and losing sight of the fact that the neuron, or nerve center, is secondary and not anterior to the functional activity of adaptation, went astray in the no-thoroughfare of a pseudo-concept of psychic disorders, a concept springing from determinism and anatomo-psychology.