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The Concept of the State and Social Psychology. DR. HANS KELSEN.
The Don Juan Figure. DR. OTTO RANK.
The Problem of the Psychological Foundation and of the Origin of Religion. II. DR. JOHANN KINKEL.
Pesychoanalytic Sociology. AUREL KOLNAI.
1. The Concept of the State and Social Psychology.—In this study the author submits to examination the nature of the state; that is, the nature of the union of individuals or of individual acts which constitute a state. He points out the fallacies of a social psychology that counts the state a psychological reality, a something in itself that binds individuals together. Social facts are confused with psychological ones, being considered as psychological processes in a narrow sense, like bodily movements, as if there were an interchange, a psychic bond proceeding from the psyche of one person acting upon that of another. The unity is supposed to lie in a reciprocal action of elements existing for a longer or a shorter time. This conception fails to account for the fact that not everything is in unity in the state; dissociation and disunity also exist. To define the unity of the state as residing in the juridic bond is to overlook the dissociated elements found in class, religion, and the like. It is an attempt to apply spatial relations to nonspatial facts.
Kelsen discards the doctrine of reciprocal action and bases his discussion upon the individual's feeling of unity; therefore upon individual psychology. Where sociology assumes the existence of a “folk soul,” a will of the whole, he finds merely certain attitudes in common, not subject to reciprocal action but responding to something external. Consciousness of this effect is a secondary thing; it may produce intensified feeling on the part of the individual, as in patriotism, or a diminished feeling, as in the lessening of grief that is shared. How, the author asks,