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A work of very great interest and acumen by a man of outstanding significance in the development of psychological thought in France.
The main thesis that the author develops is that feeling and emotion result from an arrest of tendencies, that they are an overflow consequent
upon this arrest. Tendency here is used in much the same way as we are accustomed to use it, and arrest and overflow are concepts which naturally result from the treatment of psychological states in terms of energy distribution. Man is considered as in process of adaptation, or, to use his more specific term, as in process of systematization. Pleasure and pain come under the general definitions of feelings and emotions as above, pleasure being the result of a growing systematization, and pain of a decreasing systematization.
This concept of systematization is fundamental in an understanding of his theory of emotions and feelings, the arrest of tendency liberating a considerable quantity of psychic energy which is unable to expend itself in a systematic manner, being the cause of these phenomena. It is the lack of the capacity for systematic drainage which indicates both the absence of adaptation and the smooth flow of energy which would not give rise to mental phenomena. The following, in which the author undertakes to distinguish intellectual from affective phenomena, will clarify these statements:
“In short, as a complete automatism appears to be the perfect and ideal state of the organism, the intellectual phenomenon is the indication of a slight disturbance and a relatively inconsiderable weakness in systematization, whereas the affective phenomenon is the expression of a more profound disturbance and a more considerable deficiency in systematization and harmony.”
Here we have in a few words the whole skeleton of his theory of adaptation as systematization and of the feelings and the emotions as disturbances in adaptation resulting in the overflow of energy which has not been canalized adequat