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Only last year I attempted to discover, at the suggestion of Doctor White, whether or not cancer patients reacted in a constant fashion psycho-logically, and found that the extraverted, syntonic types constituted the rule in the cases surveyed. My group included both normal and psycho-pathological individuals. The latter were usually victims of affect and paranoid disorders, rather than those of the schizoid variety. I am indeed quite gratified that the findings of this author are but little at variance with my observations in the normal group. In spite of my convictions that ontogenetic psychological events contributed not unappreciably to subsequent somatic changes, it was not without trepidation that I read and published my tentative conclusions, lest I should be termed a faddist by the organicists.
For many years Doctor White, and the Saint Elizabeths school, generally, as well as jelliffe and others in New York, have been insistent upon human activity being studied in terms of the “organism-as-a-whole.” The votaries of this standard, however, found themselves continuously wedged between two menacing bulwarks; the organicists on the one hand insisting that organic reactions were provoked solely by so-called material stimuli, and the more rabid of the psychoanalysts—the illegitimate offsprings of the Feudian movement—who often approached the subject in a fashion not far removed from Eddyism. The compromise, forced more or less by the “organism-as-a-whole group,” was consequently looked upon somewhat askance, especially in the face of so little clinical substantiation. The subsequent works, however, of Pierce Clark on epilepsy, of Jelliffe on encephalitis and of Lewis on “Constitutional Factors in Dementia Precox” have invested the movement with added impetus. Furthermore, the “organism-as-a-whole” school found itself in complete rapport with the more recent hypotheses of the relativists, who came to regard matter as a logical fiction, as did Vaihinger and other ph