Studies in Mental Deviations
- Type:
Reviews and Abstracts.
- Author:
Pro-fessor S. D. Porteus.
Vineland, N.J. : Publications of the Training School. 1922. Price $4.
Early in 1919 Professor Porteus came from Australia to the United States to succeed Dr. H. H. Goddard as Director of the PsyehologiC&1 Laboratory of the Vineland Training School. His book now published brings together the results of his various researches during three years’ tenure of that office.
His Material, however, is drawn, not only from Personal investigations carried out within that period, but also from all the data amassed bY the Laboratory during the past fifteen years. As he himself insists, both the Vineland School in America, and all workers and institutions throughout the world that hae to deal with the mentally defective, are indebted, directly or indirectly, to the support ?f Mr. Samuel Fels, of Philadelphia, who, ^vith the generosity so characteristic of his country, has financed the Laboratory throughout the years of its existence.
?Dr Porteus opens his book with a new and suggestive definition of mental deficiency: A feeble-minded person is one who by reason ?f mental defects, other than sensory, cannot attain to self-management and self-support to the degree of social sufficiency.” He states that he and his colleagues “have never seen a moral imbecile, meaning by that a person ^hose only distinguishable defect is a lack of So-called moral sense.” In this his experience is in close accord with that of British Psychologists. At the same time, it will be observed that his definition is specifically ramed to include those extreme cases of ^otional instability which certain writers in i *s country have proposed to denominate temperamentally defective.’ As he himself explicitly states, the word ‘mental’ must for ,, e Psychologist cover and include, not only ose who are defective in intelligence, but a S?. those who are unstable in emotional disposition. He justly emphasises the risk that ose who diagnose deficiency may attend too exclusively to defects merely in tested intelli gence; and adds that, while it may be difficult to over-estimate the importance of intellectual level, it is equally easy to under-estimate the importance of temperament.
Among the newer features of his book is an interesting attempt at a ‘ ‘social rating scale.’’ This is a scale for estimating those temperamental qualities upon which great stress has thus been laid. By a series of successive enquiries, Dr Porteus finds that it is possible to combine closely related character-qualities into psychological groups; and suggests that a quick and effective assessment of personality may be based upon separate estimates of seven relatively general traits?impulsiveness, excitability, moodiness, obtrusiveness, suggestibility, irresolution, and the lack of executive power. According to the correlations obtained, these component estimates are to be weighted; and the sum of the weighted results gives the final ‘ ‘social rating.’’
He also offers an original rating scale for industrial capacities, resting upon a somewhat similar scheme. Industrial capacity is to be analysed into efficiency in various simple industrial occupations; and these are weighted and marked according to the level of skill required.
Such rating scales as these should form a valuable adjunct to the data supplied by the customary mental tests. As has been so often urged in this country, psychologists of late years have been apt to neglect the method of observation and to rely mainly upon the method of experiment. Provided they are based upon a scientific plan, reports derived from observation are quite as essential and quite as trustworthy as those derived from the more usual experimental tests.
Dr Porteus discusses in succession the applicability and value in the diagnosis of mental defect of various methods of approach ?of anthropometric measurements, of the Binet tests, of his own familiar maze tests, and of a new scale for measuring educational attainments. He also describes another of his original tests which is not sufficiently well known in this country?what he calls a Form’ and-Assembling Test. This is a test which combines the good points of a form board test, a picture completion test, and a mechanical construction test. The child has to match drawings of such objects as a hammer, a penknife, a chair, and a tea-pot, by fitting together other drawings containing the component parts.
An instructive chapter of detailed casehistories is included in the volume. These are chiefly selected to throw light upon seeming discrepancies between various methods of diagnosis. The publication of case-histories is a valuable method of study, already familiar in other branches of medical enquiry, but too seldom employed in psycholgical investigation. The gradual compilation of a series of cases, both typical and anomalous, should add much to our knowledge of the mentally defective. The whole book concludes with a brief chapter emphasising the importance of individual treatment, of studying each particular defective “as a child and not as a case.”
Cyril Burt.
Herring Revision of the Binet-Simon Tests. Examination Manual. By John P. Herring. Harrap & Co., London. 1923. 5s. net.
This is, as the title indicates, still another revision of the Binet-Simon Tests of intelligence. The form of many of the tests differs but little from the original tests and the new form does not appear to have any special advantage over the old. Certain new tests are added but their significance as tests of intelligence is not very clear. In all there are 38 tests arranged in five groups, all of which, or any single group, may be administered in order to calculate the mental age of the individual by reference to a scale-table of mental age equivalent for each group.
The book is apparently intended for the use of teachers who have had no training or experience in educational psychology, and the claim is made that (presumably by the aid of this manual) ‘ ‘Public School teachers are as able to use individual examinations like the Herring-Binet as they are to teach reading, and if we consider merely the process of obtaining mental ages, and certainly more so.’ * This is, in our belief, a wholly untenable claim. The revision appears to be an attempt to reduce the testing of intelligence to a mere rule of thumb procedure. Hence in order to allow the examiner to adhere rigidly to his instructions, all those tests which have to be seen or read by the child are printed upside down so as to be read by the child seated opposite the examiner. Specimen answers are given to give an estimate of the range between satisfactory and unsatisfactory answers.
We cannot recommend the revision for general use, for unless the examiner is thoroughly competent and has made an adequate study of the subject, he is likely to fall into many of the pitfalls which beset the path of the inexperienced and thus to bring into disrepute the whole subject of mental testing.
Auden.
Psychology and Morals. By J. A. Hadfield, M.A., M.B., Ch.B. London: Metliuen & Co. 1923. Pp. vii. I86* 6s. net.
Dr Hadfield remarks in his preface that the psychologist is “in a position to speak of facts which neither the moral philosopher nor the practical pastor or teacher can afford to ignore.’’ This is the starting-point and justification of his book, a book which is well written in an easy and informal style, and which many people will find useful and suggestive. Dr Hadfield has seen very clearly that the application to educational practice of recent advances in psychological knowledge, particularly the psychology of the instincts and the ‘ ‘unconscious,’’ involves a tacit or deliberate reconstruction of ethical theory, and that any further development of the latter must take these psychological facts into serious account. We share his sense of the ultimate significance of recent psychology f?r education and for morals; but we confess that, on the whole, his book tends to confirm our private doubts as to whether, on the one hand, the time is ripe for any but the most tentative “applications,’” and, on the other, whether the working psychologist is the person to ma e them. We must admit that we distrust nothing more than the didactic tempei in t e psychologist. It has been a drag upon the “science” since its earliest beginnings, an this was never more marked than it is to-day. The psychologist and the moralist in Di. Hadfield spoil each other. When he says, for instance, that the “(Edipus complex, like all other complexes, is the result of such eniion mental conditions. . ? ? Since it is t le environmental conditions of early childhood which have given rise to our abnormalities of character…” (p. 19), he is greatly oversimplifying the facts in the interest of practical advice. It would be convenient if the facts were so simple; but they are not. The fre quent references to the sexual trauma as a principal source of neurosis, and the confusion with regard to the sexual perversions would appear to have the same origin. Dr Hadfield remarks (p. 47) that ‘ ‘repressed sex may give rise to fetichism,” a statement surprisingly misleading, and giving no hint of the detailed ontogenetics of the sexua instinct. This “instinct” is evidently still conceived by the author as a single psychological entity, which may be ‘ ‘repressed or sublimated” as a whole. One suspects that he has been so busy teaching people how to | sublimate that he has not had time to find out xuliat is sublimated.
I And the preacher in Dr Hadfield suffers no less injury at the hands of the psychologist than he inflicts upon him. The great doctrine “the middle wa?/” becomes, in fact, that of the middle class, middle class with the Merest flavouring of bohemianism, just enough to show that our observances aie Voluntary, not the result of “repression.” Hadfield’s discussion of the problem of evil, though perhaps sound physician’s sense, draws uncomfortably near banality if it is taken seriously. Not even the psychologist, the most modern psychologist of us all, can simplify life and good and evil so far. One begins to fear, indeed, wrhether the most subtle ‘ ‘self-fantasy’’ of all is not that of the I *unipotent Psychologist! g. S. Brierley. An Outline of Psychology. By William McDougall, F.R.S. London: Methuen and Co. 1923. Pp. xi, 456. Price 12s. net.
This new volume of Professor McDougall’s is intended as an introductory statement of psychological problems for beginning students, in terms of the author’s own approved form of “purposive psychology,” and is “largely a polemic” against all psychology of the mechanistic type. Professor McDougall means to catch his psychologists young, before they can have become infected with the mechanistic virus. He desires to “set their feet upon a better way,’’ in company with the true elect.
The opening chapter had already appeared as “Prolegomena to Psychology,” in the Psychological Revieiv, January 1912 and has its importance not only for the learner, but as a re-iteration and further development of the point of view of the author’s volume in the Home Un versity Library, with its pregnant criticisms of ‘ ‘ideas’’ and other historical confusions. Professor McDougall’s position in relation to “extreme” behaviourism and to Neo Realism is defined, the development of behaviourism in its most recent forms creating in him a desire to disclaim his own earlier definition of psychology as the study of behaviour. The later chapters of the book provide an outline survey of the main problems of psychology in the author’s own terms; and it is scarcely necessary to say that the exposition has the highest degree of clarity, forcefulness, persuasiveness and sweep of comprehension, and that it is the most important statement of psychology from the given single point of view that can be put into the student’s hands. It will, in fact, be an indispensable part of the future student’s reading; and, as a part, invaluable. But, it must be said, that as the main nutriment of the “aspiring psychologist,” its influence could not be other than pernicious. And this, not because it is a one-sided exposition, but because of the unfortunate temper which it reveals in the author and would be likely to foster in the unsuspecting reader.
In his anxiety to save the students who are his pupils from the dangers of atomism and mechanism and other evils, Professor McDougall seems to have forgotten his responsibilities as a serious critic to the students who are his fellows. The book is marred throughout by a lofty pontifical attitude to those who, in his judgment, err, differences of opinion being treated almost as moral perversities, and certainly as mental aberrations. Even at this date we confess to astonishment that it should be possible for any reputable author to say (p. 4.30) of ‘ ‘the popular Freudian dogma that all love is sexual,” that ‘ ‘the main fallacy is the common one that whatever things have the same name are essentially similar. Another is that, because children are produced through the agency of the sexual instinct, therefore all interest in them is sexual.” Professor McDougall presently laments this “melancholy evidence of the weakness of the human intellect.” We lament with him; but go on to include in our Jeremiad, the rarity and weakness of the sentiment of intellectual honesty, and the ease with which even learned men of high standing may fall into gross misrepresentation of the views of those from whom they differ.
But the Freudian theories, it may be conceded, act as an almost universal irritant, and there is nothing very individual, even in a discreditable sense, about Professor McDougall’s mis-statements here. It is left for him to achieve this form of distinction, and to offer us a truly surprising piece of self-revelation, in an incredible reference to Mr. Bertrand Russell, whose free open mind is evidently too high and rare an atmosphere for the “pur posive psychologist.” Professor McDougall dismisses himself rather than Mr. Russell, when he remarks, in speaking of the mechanistic type of psychology (p. ix), “Its latest exponent, Mr. Bertrand Russell, has performed the service of reducing it to the lowest level of banality (in his ‘Analysis of Mind’).’’
S. S. Brierley. ————–Some Contributions to Child Psychology. By Margaret Drummond, M.A. Edward Arnold & Co. 4s. 6d.
All workers among ‘the children who never grow up’ know full well that some of the greatest problems with which they have to deal arise not so much out of the limited capacity of their pupils to acquire knowledge, but rather from their weaknesses of character and strange abnormalities of conduct. We tend to tackle these problems in a very groping fashion, each in our own way, and no doubt most of us in time develop more or less skill in dealing with them. Even the most experienced, however, will be grateful for this little book in which Miss Drummond has put at the disposal of all the results of her careful investigations into the behaviour of young children. She interprets those conduct problems largely in the light of the newer psychological theories, and by a wealth of examples from child life brings these theories within the reach of all who have the care of children. Miss Drummond has considerable acquaintance with mentally defective children and makes occasional reference to them here. On page 122 she puts forward an interesting surmise which awaits proof by some Itard of the future. ‘ ‘It seems not impossible that many of the children of whom medical science can say only that they are suffering from defect of intelligence have gone beyond the danger point, have given themselves over to phantasy which is largely unconscious, or at least wordless, and have abandoned the struggle with an unyielding world.”
Some of us look forward to the day when ^ve shall be even stricter economists than we are at present: when we shall realise the waste involved in a child welfare system which sa^e* guards bodily health while paying little hee to mental health. Meantime this book will do much to help teachers and others to recognise and deal with, at an early stage, the root causes of which deviations in conduct are the symptoms, and what is still more important, to prevent their recurrence. Most of all it will help to bring about that sympathetic understanding which will make the rough places smooth and the earth a happier place for many.
e.l.s.r. ‘ ‘Mental Hygiene, ‘’ July, 1923. Published quarterly by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 370, Seventh Avenue, New York City. Fifty Cents a copy. Five Dollars a year.
The July number of “Mental Hygiene should be a particularly interesting one to those concerned with the problem of mental defect as no less than six of the articles deal directly with it.
Dr Bernstein reviews the present possibilities of “Colony and, Parole Care for Dependents and Defectives” and gives the latest results of the method as used at Rome State School, New York. 40% of the enrolled population of this Institution are now being cared for in colonies or on parole. (In Colonies 702: on parole at home 218 : on parole forking 172). During 1921 there passed through the colonies 690 boys and 710 girls, a total of 1400 of whom nearly one third were found fit to proceed thence to parole and discharge. The number of colonies is now 32:? 18 for boys and 14 for girls. In the 10 farm colonies the total earnings amounted to about ??% of the total costs and the 232 boys accommodated in them thus earned enough to cover the entire cost of their housing and a large part of the cost of their maintenance. At three of the girls’ colonies the inmates are ^rnployed in mills in the neighbourhood and Jt is recorded that a manager of one of the mills concerned waxed enthusiastic over the reliability and industry of his “colony prls,’’ and stated that their output was at east 75% as efficient as that of the normal Workers.
Dr Bernstein declares that “the whole character of the school has changed as a result of our colony and parole policy. Our former policy of custody for life for as many cases as Possible inevitably had a depressing, diseartening effect upon our patients, resulting ln an atmosphere of hopelessness and listlessness that had its effect in turn upon employees a^d officers. An entirely different attitude ? hopefulness and cheerfulness has been brought flVinnf ?4- 3 the community through colony life and parole is open to all with the exception of cases of extremely low-grade inte ligence and depraved and chronic delinquents.”* A rather despondent article on “More Community Aspects of Feeblemindedness,’’ by Gordon Hamilton (Secretary, Sub-committee on Feeblemindedness, Charity Organisation Society, New York City) deals with the experience of the New York C.O.S. in supervising defectives who have not had any special preliminary training in an Institution, pointing out how full of difficulties the work is, and how sorely those who are wrestling with it feel the need of more knowledge and skill.
In an article on ‘ ‘’The Classification of Mental Defectives’’ Dr Howard Potter. (Clinical Director, Letchworth Village, Thiells, New York), contends that the present classification does not adequately represent the state of our knowledge on the subject, and puts forward a new classification more in touch with demonstrated facts. His five main groups are, “Idiots,” “Imbeciles,” “Morons,” “Mentally Defective” (unclassified), “Mentally Defective with Psychosis,” and “Not Mentally Defective,” and each group he subdivides into three?Neurologic Type, Endocrinopathic Type and Idiopathic Type. Further he puts forward definite criteria for classifying in this way. He regards his scheme as purely tentative but considers nevertheless some method of the kind must sooner or later be adopted if further progress is to be made in our knowledge of mental deficiency. We cannot continue to work with such “large heterogeneous units as the idiot, the imbecile and moron groups.”
Another interesting article is one reporting the results of a ‘’Study of One Hundred Feebleminded Girls with a Mental Rating of Eleven Years or Over’’ made by the Superintendent of Wrentham State School, Mass. The purpose of the survey was to answer the question “What brought these girls to the institution? Why should girls of this mental rating be confined in an institution when our observation compels us to believe that many indivi* Page 469, duals no better endowed with mental ability are apparently making good in the community?”
Each girl was studied from three viewpoints :?(1) That of her reactions during daily life in the Institution, (2) that of her history before coming there, (3) that of her family history, and observations were made as to (a) temperament and disposition, (b) morality and habits, (c) social relationships, (d) nature and quality of work. Detailed statistics are given in the report revealing the wide prevalence amongst the girls studied of temperamental instability and uncontrolled impulses, and o1 unsatisfactory family records. The writer is therefore constrained to believe that their need for institution care is due not merely to subnormal mentality but to a general “faulty make-up” which prevents proper adjustment to social requirements.
Finally, an article entitled “The Defective Child?What can be done for it V’ by Nellie L. Perkins (Psychologist and Resident Doctor, Wayne County Psychopathic Clinic, Detroit) outlines a program for the proper care and training of mentally defective children, the scheme including the provision of facilities for diagnosis, special classes, schools and institutions, and adequate supervision by a personnel of “especially trained workers who are temperamentally suited to handle the defective.”
Besford Court Catholic Mental Welfare Hospital for Children. Sixth Annual Report.
Besford Court is an Institution in Worcestershire for feeble-minded boys, certified by the Board of Education, the Board of Control and the Home Office and under the direction of that strenuous worker for mentally defective children, the Right Rev. Monsignor Newsome.
Its Sixth Annual Report is an attractive document containing many photographs and a graphic account not only of the year’s work but of the principles?ethical and intellectual ?which have animated it.
Thus in a section headed “The Philosophy of Mental Defect.” Mgr. Newsome reveals what is perhaps the secret of the Home’s success. “Every case,” he maintains, “however defective, however burdensome to the community, however repulsive, is defective only as regards the body and its organization and not as regards the soul. Resident in that body as in a ruined temple, there is a human personality with all the dignity that pertains to a human person and with undiminished rights and privileges. Since society exists to protect individuals, it follows that the needs of such a defective being greater than ? that of a normal person he has a greater claim upon the compassion and protection of the human society of which is he a member.’’
For the policy of educating defectives in Day Special Schools Mgr. Newsome has little sympathy; indeed he sweepingly condemns it as “useless and wasteful.” He does not however advocate, as the alternative, “permanent care”, but considers that after long and careful training in a specially adapted environment the high-grade defective should have every chance of making good in ordinary life and states that a ‘’large proportion’’ (it would be interesting to have further details on this point) of Besford Court Boys are now doing so. He points out however that there are always some cases who, being sent to the Home as late as 12 or 13, are not ready for discharge at 16, and who urgently need a longer period of training. For these boys it is hoped later to provide in an “industrial Colony” but at the moment only a very few can be retained.
The Report emphasises that it is for the high-grade defective that Besford Court is primarily intended and although at first low* grade cases were received these have now been gradually transferred to other Homes. It 1S now possible, as a result, to plan the educational work to meet the needs of the high’ grade cases in a way which before was difficult and a special department has been opened for boys over 13. Organised games are given a prominent place in the curriculum and a photograph of the “First Eleven” included in the Report is a striking testimony to what lias been achieved in this direction, A Report such as this should be placed in the hands of every parent to whom the idea oi “an Institution” is fraught with fear and foreboding for we know that such devoted work as it records is now being done by many other Homes and Institutions up and down the country and its significance and value is thereby enhanced.
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