The Twenty-Sixth Maudsley Lecture: the Assessment of Personality

Extract

Psychiatry and psychology.—In his preface to The Pathology of Mind, Henry Maudsley commented on the peculiarly isolated way in which the study of mental illness had developed during the previous fifty years. “Treatises on mental disorders,” he said, “deal with their subject as if it belonged to a science entirely distinct from that which is concerned with the sound mind.” This, he continued, is as though a pathologist were to discuss cardiac and respiratory disease, with little or no knowledge of current work on the physiology of the heart or the lungs. And it was one of his chief aims “to put a happy end to the inauspicious divorce between the two sciences.” Partly in the hope of bringing them into closer touch, his discussion of pathological conditions was prefaced by a systematic account of the normal mind: and in the first edition of his work (1867) the two topics were included in a single volume. Nevertheless, in spite of Maudsley's arguments and his excellent example, few writers on mental pathology have, until quite recently, paid much attention to advances in general psychology. When they describe mental processes or characteristics, they constantly fall back on popular concepts or on out-of-date terms which present an incongruous mixture of an obsolete faculty psychology with an antiquated associationism—doctrines that were already under heavy criticism when Maudsley himself was writing.