http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/9758523

An introduction to objective psychopathology

"This book is essentially a psychopathologist's account of his studies and interpretations of various modes of human and animal behavior. It is meant to reflect the importance of effecting such studies by the use of scientifically formulated methods of research as an essential supplement to the always useful but never quite trustworthy methods of field and clinical observation. Disturbances of the human reactive equipment may vary as to seriousness from a mere habitual lack of poise to a grave form of insanity without lying outside the range of the psychopathologist's specific interests. All such disturbances reflect, in my opinion, faults in the development of identifiable responsive properties of the personality. My efforts to develop methods for the identification of such properties may seem, at first sight, to have led me far afield, since my researches have included not only nervous patients, relatively "normal" adults and children as subjects, but such animals as monkeys, cattle, dogs, cats, rats and gophers. There are, however, many justifying precedents for such a procedure in other fields of medicine; and as I have currently sought, over a good many years, to correlate my clinical findings with the findings of my field and experimental observations of these various human and animal subjects, there have appeared here and there certain behavioristic common denominators, as it were, which seem to me to be of value for an understanding of human behavior. The results of this work are here offered to physicians, social workers and lay readers who may share with me a hope that in time psychopathologic research will make possible the construction of textbooks devoted to systematic accounts of the human personality as an integration of adjustive functions, each of which may be regarded as playing a recognizable role in the determination of total response to particular types of situations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)"--Pref.

Open All Close All