The Autonomic Functions and the Personality.

Abstract

and others. Holt's adoption of the "wish" in his book on "The Freudian Wish" as the "first key which psychology has ever had which fitted and, moreover, the only one that psychology will ever need" 1,(29, p. vii), indicates the nature of the physiological trend in academic psychology. As to the nature or source of the energy of the wish Holt says: "One will best, I think, not hypothecate to this end any such thing as ' psychic energy,' but look rather, for the energy so expended in the nervous system " (29, p. 4). This brings the student abruptly to the physiology of the emotions and the nature of the autonomic functions of the personality. Watson, in his physiological work on "Behavior," in order to avoid the dilemma that always arises with the adoption of the parallelistic soul-body hypothesis, wholly ignored the function of consciousness, which rather weakened the monistic position, the phenomena attending consciousness being the last stronghold of the parallelist. Consciousness of self is too omnipresent a fact to be disregarded. There is a distinct functional difference between the integrative functions of the unconscious and the fully conscious individual which lies in the persistent fact that in tli^l atter consciousness of self exists, and in the former it does not. [The assumption that in the unconscious animal some coordinating cerebral area or center is out of order is unsatisfactory, if it is held that in this center or centers consciousness of the functions of the rest of the body exists when the center is in proper working order, because cerebral pathology cannot demonstrate it even by elimination of each cerebral area. If it is, however, assumed that the afunctional brain area prevents the organism from reacting as an integrative unity to the special or sensational activity of some one or several of its parts and the result of this function of reacting as a unity is consciousness, that is awareness by the body as a whole of the hyper-activities of some division of itself, then the behaviorist and psycho-pathologist may deal with consciousness as a physiological phenomenon without being embarrassed by the mind-matter riddle. The phenomenon of consciousness, as a result of the synthetic activity of the constituent parts of the organism, is as much of an entity or fact as a nerve cell is a synthetic structure; duration of existence not being a fundamental difference. There has been a sleight-of-hand movement in psychology to drop the term "consciousness " and adopt the term " awareness " in order to escape the Sphinx. If the above physiological conception of the mechanism of consciousness of self is true then the psycho-physiologist has an en-Part II is devoted to a consideration of such physiological data as are suited to demonstrate the dominant nature of the autonomic apparatus. The interpretation of (i) the continuity of postural tonus of the striped muscles as the source of a continuous kinesthetic stream, and of (2) the unstriped muscles as the source of a continuous affective stream, is based p...