You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As early as 1926 Dr. Brown was happy enough to utilize a phrasing of “reversible” and “irreversible” processes that take place in structure, either as an original point of view or as an adaptation of the conception which ran throughout Jelliffe and White's Diseases of the Nervous System and which they in turn had more or less borrowed from Hughlings Jackson's “Evolution and Dissolution” formulations.
Every process that takes place in an organ is “organic” and the term “functional” pulled a herring over the trail and has been a cause of loose thinking ever since it was utilized. Dr. Brown would substitute the term psychoneurosis, or psychogenic as has been the practice in psychiatry now for some time.
He opens with a discussion of dissociation in hysteria but advances only to the Janet front and then goes on with Suggestion and the Subconscious, and is a little muddled on the nature of abreaction, though stating the transference situation. He then advances to mental analysis and principally ‘Psychoanalysis’ of freudian patterning.
It is evident Dr. Brown is not aware of the work of one of his own confreres in London when he finds difficulties in the interpretation of “battle dreams”, nor do we find him at all cogent in his so-called alternative theory of dreams. Sleep for him is an “instinct” which battles with other “instincts” and in the muddle dreams may settle the conflict or the individual wakes.
He emphasizes, as if original, that ‘sexuality’ in the freudian sense should not be confused with the man in the street idea of sexuality. Then follows a chapter on the “Libido Theory” in which he would avoid going into the details of infantile sexuality even though the “theory” demands their minutest examination.
Chapter V gives a brief resumé of ‘Schools’ of psychotherapy in which he leans to what he considers is different in Jung from Freud. Apart from nominalism, metaphor and metaphysics one would be put to it to see that Jung has said anything essential in this matter.