The Development Of The Sexual Impulses

R E Money-Kyrle, R.E. Money-Kyrle, Money-Kyrle, R E

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136337444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume VII of ten in a collection on Physiological Psychology. Originally published in 1932, in this study the author attempts to bring order and consistency into his ideas about psycho-analysis and the relations of this science to philosophy, physiology, biology, anthropology, sociology and ethics, and presents one system for looking at the area of the development of sexual impulses.

Chapter I

THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGY

1. Interactionism and Behaviourism.

THE psychology of the present day is necessarily a hybrid science whose parents are introspection and the study of behaviour. For we are not yet able either fully to systematize our mental lives without some reference to the physical processes of stimulus and reaction, or adequately to explain behaviour in terms of neural processes without some reference to mental states. The usual procedure is to give mental causes for behaviour and physical causes for thought, or in other words, to treat consciousness as an intermediary cause between stimuli and reactions.

Thus ordinary psychology seems to imply a dualistic interactionist philosophy. This philosophy regards the consciousness and the body as belonging to two separate kinds of reality, which interact upon each other. Thus the consistent interactionist must suppose that, although in simple reflexes the reaction is physically determined by the stimulus and by the engrams of former stimuli, the mechanical chain of processes of more complex reflexes is sometimes interrupted by a mental link of a heterogeneous substance which is at least partially determined by the receptor stimulus and at least partially determines the muscular response.

Most psychologists are untroubled by the philosophical assumptions of their science and are content to go their way without either questioning them or following up their further implications. Dr. Watson, however, has been so disturbed by these assumptions that he appears to have denied consciousness altogether in order to limit psychology to Behaviourism. And Prof. McDougall has applied a dualistic interactionist conception to maintain the partial independence of the soul. For, once the mind is believed to break the physical causal chain from stimulus to behaviour, it is easy to go on to state that the mind is only partially determined by receptor stimulus and that it is open to other influences, such as the voice of God, or that it is partly ‘free’.

Now I believe that the procedure of ordinary psychology is legitimate, but that the philosophical conception which seems to justify it is misleading. It has led both to the behaviouristic repudiation of the method of ordinary psychology and to the interactionist denial of the physical determinateness of behaviour. Such results seem deplorable; for I believe that these two sciences should be each other’s closest allies. I propose here to submit a concept of the nature of psychology which reconciles the claims of both. But 1 shall start with the apparently irrelevant questions: How is physics constructed? And how is it applied?

2. The construction of physics.¹

In the terminology of Hume, consciousness may be divided into impressions and ideas, or, what is the same thing, into sensations and images.² These differ from one another in distinctness and in other characteristics enumerated by him. The most important difference is that ideas are more directly dependent on wishes than are impressions. Ideas are reproductions of impressions, and impressions are patterns of colours, sounds, tactual sensa and the like.

The visual field of the child may be supposed to consist at first almost wholly of sensations. Among these, certain sensa-complexes are relatively stable and form the core of what are later called material objects. And among these again are some which are more or less permanent constituents of the foreground. These are later distinguished from other material objects as parts of the self.³

Visual contact between part of the self (that is a constituent of the permanent foreground of the field of view) and any of those relatively stable complexes we call sense objects is invariably accompanied by a sensation of hardness. Further, contact between two objects of the environment is visually similar to contact between the hand and one of these; it evokes therefore the image which is the copy of the tactual sensa that would have accompanied this. Finally any visual object, even when not in contact with anything, excites the idea of hardness. That is, we feel empathetically what happens to other objects as though it had happened to ourselves. And, even when nothing is happening to them, we see them only together with the image of that feeling of solidity which varies, but never completely disappears, with the violence of the events in which our own body is seen to play a part. Thus in the perceptual field visual objects are fringed with tactual memories.

21. The world of common sense.

Memories or reproductions of former perceptual fields may be pieced together in the order in which they originally occurred. Such an ideal construction, resembling an amplified perceptual field, forms what we call the external world of common sense. Because it is composed of ideas rather than sensations, any part of it can come into being when and as we choose, with or without that foreground which we call ourselves. In this sense, unlike the perceptual field, it exists independently of us, independent alike of our movement and our presence. Any particular field of view corresponds to some part of this external world; it is the original of which this is a copy; and as sensations vary, lighting up now this, now that part of the ideal extension of our environment, we say that we are moving in the external world from place to place.

22. The world of physics.

Just as the external world of common sense is the ideal extension of our perceptual field, so is the world of physics the ideal refinement of the world of common sense.

That half-circle of continuous green we call a distant tree is seen on a close inspection to be composed of a multitude of leaves; and we ever after speak of this sensa-complex as being always there waiting to be seen, as being the real tree of which the half-circle of continuous green is but the appearance. It is permanently there in the sense that its memory image is a constituent of our world of common sense. Thus the difference between appearance and reality is the difference between a sensa-complex as seen from afar and the memory of what this complex changed into when we approached it closely.

The analogy of the tree suggests that a still closer inspection of the leaves would change them also into an atomic structure. Microscopic inspection verifies this anticipation, and chemistry enables us to guess at what might be seen or felt beyond the limits of the microscope. And in this way the atomic world of nineteenth century physics was constructed. It was believed to be real in the sense that every part of it was believed to be a theoretical possibility of experience.

But this mechanistic physical world was found to be less satisfactory than was at first supposed. The grosser physical changes of liquids that boiled or froze could be accounted for along these lines; that is, they could be correlated with a simple mechanistic picture. But some of the mutual interdependences of objects at a distance from each other eluded the attempt to correlate them with mechanistic pictures. Finally it was found more convenient to substitute for this atomic world a purely mathematical construction. The four dimensions of the world of common sense can be correlated with four series of real numbers, a point with an ordered set of four numbers, one chosen from each of the four series; the characteristics of the point with another set called potentials; and the laws of nature by relations between the potentials of neighbouring points. Thus the world of physics of the present day is a purely mathematical construction from which every other quality has been abstracted. For it is a peculiarity of the scientific world that the number of its distinct qualities decreases as it is refined. The table of the perceptual field and of the world of common sense is hard and coloured; the physical table is at first composed of particles that are hard and energetic, but which possess no colour, and later of a colony of places where the measurement of the angles of triangles give strange results.

But though the physical world is ultimately a conceptual world it is not arbitrary. It is formed by definite rules of abstraction, interpolation, and extrapolation, operating upon the perceptual field. It is even objective in a certain sense. For if the same operations of abstraction, interpolation, and extrapolation are performed on different perceptual fields, the same physical world results. The physical world is real in the sense that it is objective, that is, common to all observers.

3. The relation of the physical world to consciousness.

The physical world is thus ultimately a conceptual world, a mathematical construction. It is an idea of man and is therefore not a reality separate from the reality of consciousness but a part of the consciousness of the scientist who thinks it. And even if it stands for a reality beyond, this can only be another perceptual world theoretically possible to beings with more sensitive sense organs— not something which exists independently of being seen. Thus, when we speak of real objects, as opposed to sensations of them, we mean the conceptual object which the operation of physical abstraction applied to the sense object would yield. Since the physical world is not a reality separate from consciousness, but an abstraction from consciousness, relations between it and consciousness are not relations between two separate realities but relations between concepts and feelings. For this reason the dualistic-interactionist basis of ordinary psychology is misleading, even if, for reasons which will presently appear, its consequences are often true.

4. The applications of physics.

The object of science is to give knowledge, that is, true expectations of experience. By itself that construction which is the physical world gives no knowledge and is entirely useless; but there are certain procedures by which true expectations can be calculated from it. These are mainly of three kinds, and form three branches of applied physics which we will consider in turn.

41. Inverted physics.

The first makes use of the correlation between physical objects and external sensations, and may be called inverted physics, for it inverts the process by which the physical world was originally constructed. The physical world is an abstraction from the world of common sense and is therefore correlated with it. Thus, to find out what any part of the common sense world would look like, it is only necessary to reverse that process by which the physical world was constructed. Now the common sense world is formed by piecing together our memories, and is therefore small in space and time, and full of gaps. But the physical world is uniform, so that we can extrapolate it beyond the boundaries of the common sense world and interpolate its gaps. Thus, if we want to know what the common sense world would look like beyond our experience we can construct it from the physical world, which is larger and more complete, by reversing the same process of abstraction which we applied to that part of the common sense world which came within our experience. In other words we know that physics would reduce a certain sensa-complex in the common sense world first to a collection of atoms and finally to a piece of world geometry, so that, if another part of the physical world is similarly constructed, we know that the corresponding perceptual field would contain a similar sensa-complex.

Inverted physics is therefore the procedure by which we can extend the sense world beyond our fields of view. But it can only tell us what external sensations to expect, and not the emotions and ideas that will be associatively evoked by these. Thus, if inverted physics were the only kind of applied physics, the world of physics would be of no use in helping us to anticipate any experience except external sensations. But even these external sensations would not be definitely foretold. Inverted physics only tells us what sensa-complexes we should have if certain conditions (which it does not itself specify) were fulfilled. There must be no impervious matter between the place in the physical world which corresponds to these sensa-complexes in the common sense world, and our sense organs, and no break in the neural path from these sense organs to the brain. Thus, inverted physics specifies correlations between the world of physics and certain possibilities of sensation, that is, it specifies correlations which do not hold good unconditionally, but only under conditions which it is beyond its scope to specify.

42. Physiological psychology.

The second type of applied physics makes use of a correlation between sensory stimuli and sensations. It is the science of physiological psychology. We know that retinal impressions, if the brain and nerves are intact, usually give rise to visual impressions. And similar receptor-sensory relations hold for all the external sense organs of the body. Thus, physiological psychology can, theoretically at least, give us all the true expectations that we can obtain from inverted physics. But it gives us more than this. For there are internal sense organs as well as external. We know, for instance, that certain visceral stimuli give rise to sensations of hunger, and it has been argued that all emotions are visceral sensations. Thus, physiological psychology can theoretically give true expectations about both external and internal sensations, whereas inverted physics only gives information about external sensations. But like inverted physics, physiological psychology does not specify unconditional correlations. It states what sensations would be correlated with what stimuli if the neural path from the sense organs to the brain is unbroken by physical injury or central inhibition. Its degree of indeterminateness is, however, less than that of inverted physics; for, whereas inverted physics assumes unspecified conditions both between external objects and sense organs, and between sense organs and brain, physiological psychology only assumes the second of these two.

43. Psycho-physics.

The third type of applied physics, which can be called psycho-physics, is not yet far advanced, but if it were ever completed it would render the other two theoretically unnecessary. It investigates a direct correlation between cerebral processes⁴ and consciousness. This correlation is probably, unlike those investigated by inverted physics and physiological psychology, not only valid for the whole of consciousness, instead of for the sensory part alone, but also unconditioned by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I: The Nature of Psychology
• Chapter II: The Impulses of the Organism
• Chapter III: The Phylogenesis of Impulses
• Chapter IV: The Development of Cultural Impulses
• Chapter V: The Ontogenesis of Impulses
• Chapter VI: The Effects and Value of Psychology
• Index