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Like all the articles appearing in this publication, the following outline is not more than a statement of the position of its authors. However, it seems necessary to us to state our position in regard to the French psychanalytic movement.
La Revue de Psychologie Concrète stands, in France, very nearly alone. This is inevitable inasmuch as it is the new psychology that we wish to represent while only the classical school can be said to exist in France. All documents of research, every medium of expression of which French psychologists could make use are in the hands of those who represent classical psychology. The psychological laboratory of the University of Paris represents neo-Wundtism diluted with oratorical caution borrowed from an objective psychology whose objectivity, however, no longer deceives, and as for its relations with the new tendencies, they are of a purely perfunctory and bibliographical nature. That institute has not yet advanced beyond the magical conception of the scientific method, and if the researches carried on there are not wholly devoid of interest, they are, in any case, quite out of proportion to the efforts put forth and incommensurate with the terms used. In fact, they fail to arouse the French school of psychology from the state of somnolence characteristic of it in the contemporary movement. On the other hand, the so-called “armchair psychologists” have not yet. gotten over the fascination produced by the bland jugglery of Bergsonian “dynamism,” and even their opposition to Mr. Bergson is utterly weak for, in reality, they are convinced that the mythology of quality, of duration, of intuition, etc., constitutes the last word in psychology. Moreover, psychology as taught at the Sorbonne is a perfect picture