Human mentality in the light of psychiatric experience : an outline of general psychiatry / by Bror Gadelius.

  • Gadelius, Bror, 1862-1938.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Human mentality in the light of psychiatric experience : an outline of general psychiatry / by Bror Gadelius. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/632 (page 9)
    The period of development through which psychiatry has passed since the first edition of this volume appeared may well be said to have been uncommonly fruitful. New facts and new points of view have come to light in many quarters, and it is especially in the domains of neurology and heredity research, which are intimately connected with psychiatry, that a number of observations and experiences have been added to our knowledge with the effect of entirely recasting our fundamental view of the organic substratum of mental life, and our conception as to the genesis of mental disorder. In 1924, when the fourth volume1) of the first edition was ready, and the whole work was thus complete, I had occasion to mention what a revolutionising influence on psychology and psychopathy the study of certain diseases affecting the mid-brain and its large nerve- nuclei has had, and will certainly have also in the future. The symp¬ tom-picture of diseases in the subcortex (the mid-brain and brain- trunk), and not least in conditions of so-called parkinsonism after un¬ favourable cases of encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness), affords an insight into the significance of these parts for the mental auto¬ matisms. Comparative-anatomical experience of the role played by these biologically primitive centres as instruments for the mental life of animals throughout the whole animal series, coupled with the know¬ ledge of the said symptoms, has opened new paths for the under¬ standing of the structure of mental processes and their development out of more elementary and primitive automatic relations. And against the background of the theories I venture to put forward in regard to the significance of these relations for normal psychology, the psycho- 1) The present work is a translation of volumes I and II of the Swedish edition. Volumes III and IV contain the outlines of a special psychiatry.