The Action Pattern

“The principle of action patterns of discharge as integral parts of the structural organization” as laid down as a tenet of a new American School of Psychopathology by Dr. William A. White, in the “Foundations of Psychiatry,” offers a vantage ground for a solution of the problems of the neuroses which excels any advance hitherto made.

From this standpoint the reaction of the individual to his environmental stimulus becomes a dynamic center from which develops an organization of physiological functions and psychic mechanisms into a character or personality whose final purpose is some kind of delivery of muscular energy against the environmental resistance.

The action pattern is the particular set of the organism as mediated by the emotional apparatus which fixes resolute ways of visceral function, conscious feeling, psychic mechanism and motor delivery of energy.

Out of this resolute action pattern arise neurotic signs and symptoms and also standards of conduct.

The advantage of the action pattern fact as a basis of thinking is that it no more defines the nature of energy than does a proven electrical reaction include a definition of the nature of electricity. It is scientific rather than philosophic.

The correlate of the action pattern idea is the concept of the symbol as “a source and a carrier of energy” because the action pattern is rigidly geared up to the symbol as its starting lever.

Both these tenets of action pattern and of symbol are easily demonstrable in the formation of character and are of a nature to permit corroboration by successive observers of the same character formation.

These facts apparently possess a universal application to every class of neurosis. They are more easily demonstrable in the anxiety type of neurosis because this is the most rudimentary and apparently a frequent ground plan underlying more complicated psychic structures.

This paper designs to present some observations gained in the