An outline of psychology / by Edward Bradford Titchener.

  • Titchener, Edward Bradford, 1867-1927
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of psychology / by Edward Bradford Titchener. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    gether, and what processes are relatively independent; and we may have factors brought under our notice which would have escaped us altogether in the normal mind, because masked or obscured by the presence of other processes. As the first business of the psycholo- gist is analysis, this assistance from mental pathology is very important. Again : it is often said that one does not realise the blessing of health unless one has recently recovered from an illness. Health is appreciated by contrast with ill- health. So in psychology : when we contrast the normal consciousness with the abnormal, we are better able to ap- preciate what the normal consciousness is, and to under- stand its mechanism or working. A case of blind-deaf-mutism, like that of Laura Bridgman,1 is, so to speak, a psychological experiment made for us by Nature herself. When we observe how a mind works, which lacks the perceptions of sight and hearing, and the sensations accompanying the movements of speech, we can estimate the place which these sensations and perceptions occupy in our own conscious life; and the makeshifts of the defective mind, the various ways in which the processes remaining to compose it are made to do double or triple duty, give us welcome hints as to the hidden resources and obscurer functions of our own fuller and richer consciousness. Or again : suppose that a man, blind from his birth, is rendered able 1 Laura Dewey Bridgman was born in 1829 at Hanover, New Hampshire, and died in 1889, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, Boston, Massachu- setts. An attack of scarlet fever at the age of two years deprived her of hear- ing and of the sight of her left eye, while it greatly impaired the senses of smell and taste. Speech was lost with the loss of hearing ; and the sight of the right eye disappeared entirely six years after the illness. A special system of education was devised for Laura Bridgman, and ex- tended from 1837 1(850. From the reports of her mental development during this period, and from examinations of her capacities made at a later date, much valuable psychological information has been obtained.