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3. The organicist trend and the relations ofpsychology and biology
Psychology 235
There is no mental life without organic life, while the opposite is not necessarily
true; and there is no behaviour without functioning of the nervous system
(starting from the Coelenterata), the former going further than the nervous sys-
tem. Above all, everything that is organic is subject to definite verification and
presents more observable and measurable manifestations than conduct and con-
sciousness. These are all reasons for directing psychological explanations to-
wards the relating of mental processes and behaviour to physiological processes.
I. This is definitely a permanent trend in psychology, and in addition to what has
already been achieved, it increasingly shows promise of a great future. But it
should be made clear from the start that it assumes two distinct forms and that
current trends are not always in line with certain schools of thought in the past.
There is the reductionist trend, the aim of which is pure and simple identification
of the mental process, conceived as a simple phenomenological expression, with
its organic concomitant, conceived as constituting its true nature or at any rate
its direct explanation. There is also a trend that can be called relational or
dialectic and which involves distinguishing between many scales of phenomena,
both in the organism or nervous system and in behaviour or conduct, and dis-
cerning the interaction or feedback between processes of different scales, so
that there is no longer any reduction from the higher to the lower but closer
and closer solidarity.
Lest there should be any misunderstanding, let us at once note that this prob-
lem of the relations between psychology and physiology or biology goes far
beyond the particular question of the relations between consciousness as such
(therefore not reaction as a whole or conduct) and its nervous concomitant,
which was referred to in the ‘Introduction’ (section 7, heading m). The current
general tendency is to recognize an isomorphism and not an interaction between
the forms of this consciousness and those of its concomitant (the isomorphism
that we presented as existing between ‘implications’ peculiar to consciousness
and the causality peculiar to the nervous process), which certainly does not
mean that the nervous processes accompanied by consciousness are different
from the others, as could be shown by electro-encephalographic recordings of
states of ‘alertness.’ But to deny any interaction between consciousness as such
and its nervous concomitants is in no way to dispute the interaction between
conduct (which includes consciousness but goes beyond it) and physiological
processes. The whole of psychosomatic (or cortico-visceral) medicine shows
such interaction, which proves nothing either for or against the influence of
consciousness as such on higher nervous activities, but definitely demonstrates
the influence of such psycho-physiological activities on regulations of a lower
order. From this point of view psychosomatic research is, of course, of great
theoretical importance, as are also all types of biologically-oriented psychologi-
cal therapeutics. In this connexion, special mention should be made of the
rapid development of pharmaco-psychological research.
Let us now turn to the reductionist or interactionist trends which are con-