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The Editor has paid tribute to psychiatric tradition in publishing the scholarly article by Dr. Llopis.* The article in fact is reminiscent of the discussions a number of years ago when young physicians, anxious to remain psychotherapists and still acknowledged experts of clinical psychiatry, tried hard to separate fully the “organic process” of psychoses from that of the “psychogenic neurosis,” at least at staff conferences. Their hearts could not have been in this division; I know there was much of self-sacrifice in their manifest attitude.
At the request of the Editor the writer attempts to present another picture of the problem of psychoses and neuroses, also taking up some of the formulations contained in the article by Dr. Llopis. Here we will not argue for or against his central thesis, the unity of the affective and schizophrenic psychoses. The minds of psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatrists need not be exercised by the questions which are of prime concern in Dr. Llopis' article. Our concepts of psychopathology are in many aspects different from those held by the experts to whom Llopis' argument is addressed in the first place. And the difference seems to begin with our more emphatic stress on, and belief in, the dynamic power of psychic processes.—S.L.
At present we have no alternative to the assumption that all mental function is nerve-cell function. Certain not yet definable processes within the brain cells are concerned with what appears as mental life. Probably the same cells also generate other processes, which pertain to the non-psychic nervous regulations of the organism. The specific mental function we comprehend as a complex development of the primitive stimulus-response phenomenon.