Paulhan - The Laws of Feeling

PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
In 10 Volumes

First published in 1930
by Routledge, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1930 F Paulhan, Translated by C K Ogden

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is available from the British Library

The Laws of Feeling
ISBN 9781-13633-7-727
ISBN 978-1-1363-3772-7 (ePub)
Physiological Psychology: 10 Volumes
ISBN 9781-13633-7-727
The International Library of Psychology: 204 Volumes
ISBN 9781-13633-7-727

THOUGH it cannot be said that the writings of Frdric Paulhan are entirely unknown outside France, references to his name in English publications are few and far between. Already, however, before the War he had been responsible for more than a dozen major works, and in 1928-9 his latest treatises, Les Puissances de t Abstraction and La Double Fonction du Langage, completed a twenty-volume programme whose main features were determined over sixty years ago.

Paulhan, in fact, has been one of the leading figures in contemporary psychology for over half-a-century. So early as 1877 he began to contribute important articles to the Revue Philosophique. In 1880 appeared his Physiologie de I'Esprit, in which year Ribot referred to his original treatment of emotion, and expressed his general agreement with Paulhans views.The original of the present volume was first published in 1884 in the Revue Philosophique under the title Les phnomnes affectifs, et les lois de leur apparition. It was enlarged in book form in 1887. A second edition was called for in 1901, and a third in 1912, but for many years before the fourth edition appeared (1926) it remained, like so much of the best French psychology, out of print and unobtainable. There is no copy in the Bodleian, the London University Library, the London Library, the Science Museum Library, or the Psychological Library at Cambridge. The edition of 1901 may, however, be found in the British Museum and that of 1887 in the Cambridge University Library. This work has here been supplemented, with his consent, by M. Paulhans contribution to the Revue Philosophique (July-August, 1920, Nos. 7-8) entitled La sensibilit, Pintelligence et la volont dans tous les faits psychologiques.

The translation itself was begun at a time when the challenge of Endocrinology, Behaviorism, and the various branches of Comparative Physiology, no less than the successful advance of Psycho-analysis, made it seem doubtful to many whether psychology ought not shortly to dispense with psychologists, in the traditional sense, altogether. It was therefore laid circumspectly aside until, after a lapse of ten years, it became clear that the more advanced members of a variety of schools were converging on a formulation closely resembling that to which so much thought had already been given by others of whose very existence they were presumably unaware.

Moreover, if it be true, as Professor Lashley told the Ninth International Congress of Psychology (1929), that psychology is to-day a more fundamental science For the modern psychologist, however, the problem of emotion is still in such confusion that one can draw no conclusions with confidence.

Paulhans main thesis, that feeling and emotion are due to an arrest of tendencies, may be related historically to the suggestions of Bain and Maudsley to which reference is made on pages 24 and 44. The treatment of emotion as due to the overflow consequent on this arrest may to-day commend itself to many who would hesitate to extend it to the whole affective field. Paulhans generalization of the law to cover all forms of feeling, including both pleasure and pain as he defines them (pp. 19 and 82), is implicit in the very broad bio-physical conception of man as an un-adapted animal (p. 191) which also underlies his theory of consciousness (p. 10) and personality (p. 144).

That such an approach to psychological phenomena, whatever its ultimate validity, may be fruitful in the development of new lines of thought is shown by reference to other works in the Library of Psychology. Thus the reader of Vaihingers Philosophy of As-if will find {infra pp. 176-9) a full awareness of the heuristic value of error, while Professor Thurstones account of The Nature of Intelligence and Rignanos explanation of rational and representative processes in his Psychology of Reasoning are foreshadowed in the discussions of the selective character of intelligence (p. in) and its adaptive, experimental function (p. 176) respectively. The main contention of those who adopt the Gestalt terminology will be recognized in the account of the relation of a feeling to its constituent parts (pp. 132-4), while material for a sane development of Behaviorism might have been derived from the remarks on observation and introspection at page 11. Moreover, since the first great disturbance of equilibrium, and the first arrest of the fundamental tendency of the organism thereto, is due to The Trauma of Birth, even the speculations of Dr Rank might have found an impressive setting in a theory which accounts so plausibly both for Anxiety and for Excitement. Psycho-analysis in general may also profit by the neutral treatment of Adaptation and Adjustment; on page 95, for example, will be found an account of organic disturbance due to emotional conflict, successfully freed (cf. p. 144) from the moral and political interpretations to which the neo-Adlerian movement is so naively prone.