British Journal of Medical Psychology

Eder, M. D. The Myth of Progress. 1-15.

Davies, A. E. Social Implications of Psychiatry. 15-41.

Grewal, K. S. Mitragynine in Man. 41-59.

Campion, G. C. Thalamo-cortical Circulation of Neural Impulses and the Psychoneuroses. 59-65.

White, H. D. J. In Impediment in the Voice and a Criticism of Adler's “Upward Philosophy.” 65-74.

Myth of Progress.—Dr. Eder opens this interesting address as Chairman to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society with the somewhat apochryphal statement, “we are born mad, acquire morality, and become stupid and unhappy. Then we die.” This is the natural history of man under domestication. To relieve his perplexity and to mitigate his unhappiness he takes refuge in myths. The narration of these myths is the history of civilization. Renan's idea that “Religion was a necessary imposture” even so these myths, smaller and larger, local or universal, are necessary and desirable.

Impostures, myths, are found out, but others take their places. Thus there have been “ideas of primitive Christianity,” those that brought about the French Revolution, the ideas that inspired Mazzini, Mark and Lenin. It is on the “idea of progress,” however, that Eder would concentrate. This is a comparatively modern myth. The Greeks talked about cyclic processes, only the moderns speak of the forward progress of civilization. Among the encyclopedists of France the idea had its inception that there were definite laws in the history of mankind. Darwin's Origin of Species put progress of a definite type on the map. Even Freud had some optimism about the primacy of the intellect even if far, far away as yet. Yet he offers no panacea, no consolation, in spite of man's autistic thinking. Hence we get back to the phase in which we were born, in the illusion of omnipotence “and ever seek to return to this condition of megalomania.”

Eder would trace the steps in the shifting of the illusions from the earlier religions to the hopes in science for example.