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“Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity to greatness,” said Whitehead, “has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.”1
The scientific revolution in which Galileo and Newton were the leaders, was a passionate protest against the inert ideas of ecclesiastical scholasticism. But their scientific successors in the three hundred years up to our own time have followed the formula of Whitehead. They have steadily forged chains of what was, in Galileo's hand, a sword.
For our generation then, a new revolution is needed. And among those who have most strongly stirred humanity to protest against the increasingly narrow interpretation of scientific modes of thought, was Hans Prinzhorn, who died in the summer of 1933, shortly after the Hitler revolution.
Unknown, however, to all but a small band of kindred young spirits, Prinzhorn was the Prometheus of a new movement in psychology and psychotherapy—particularly in the study of personality. He died, however, before he had the recognition and influence which should surely have been his.
The inert idea against which Prinzhorn struggled with such consummate literary power, was the attempt to coerce the study of