FREUDIANISM. The name applied to the views of the most modern school of psy chology and philosophy, of which Sigmund Freud (q.v.) is the central figure. The gov erning conceptions of contemporary scientific fall into three classes. One class regards mind and body as coordinate and parallel functions of one another. It does not assume any causal connection between two men tal states. In the laboratory it aims to check up introspection by the control of its conditions, and it is content to record the structure of these states as introspection, so controlled, re veals them. Another class regards conscious ness or mental states as such as non-existent. What is normally called consciousness it describes as behavior (q.v.). In the laboratory it replaces introspection by rigidly controlled observations of the reaction of sentient beings to stimuli. This reaction, which is to its last detail physiological, is considered with its stimu lus, as the mental unit of behavior. Hence, for the first group, consciousness runs parallel to the interaction of the body, or of a state of the body, with its environment. It is a third and later entity, which appears after the other two already exist, while for the second group con sciousness is the response or behavior of the organism toward its environment. For the first group psychology is purely a descriptive science; for the second grouppsychology is an explanatory science which differs, however, from physiology in that it takes into account not the organism alone, but the organism to gether with the environment to which it re sponds. The third class falls between the other two. It believes in the reality of conscious ness with the parallelists, and with the be haviorists it believes in its functional character. From the point of view of functional psy chology consciousness modifies both the organ ism and its environment and is reciprocally modified by them.
All three of these conceptions are alike in that they have not succeeded in formulating any precise law of the rise, operation and sub sidence of ideas. The so-called law of associa tion') is nearest to such a law; but that is rather a formulation of the conditions under which ideas appear together than a state ment of their dynamic relationships and bases. It does not, nor does any 'other of the current hypotheses, unify the various processes of will ing, feeling and thinking under a single causal concept.
Such a unification is, however, precisely what Freud effects. Psychologists have, on the whole, paid little and unflattering attention to Freud, but Freud has been the first to express the process of consciousness in a single causal pattern which can utter and coordinate in gene tic terms all the phases of consciousness, in all degrees of normality and abnormality. The
pattern may be designated as follows: Mind, like body, consists of distinct units of action, which Freud calls "complexes') or wishes. These are normally integrated and fused. The essen tial conditions of life are, however, such that not all can be realized or satisfied at one and the same time. Some can never be realized. Life, consequently, consists of constant choices between conflicting alternatives, of which many must be repressed if the course of life is to go on at all. The repression may be complete or partial. When it is effected, it does not destroy the wish; it renders the wish subconscious. The subconscious wish may then be completely dissociated from the conscious life and alternate with it, or it may emerge against the repres sive factor, with a resultant in feeling, attitude and ideas that constitutes the overt state of consciousness and behavior. Every phase of a state of mind may be accounted for in these terms, which are ultimately reducible to the action of the primary instincts of self-preserva tion, sex, hunger and gregariousness.
Mind thus becomes an interplay and re sultant of separate conational units, whose operation can be graphed as the physicist graphs the operation of lines of force. So stated, the view contains nothing novel. It is the same which Spinoza has worked out in detail in his 'Ethics' and which William James expressed in so many places in his