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Updated: June 7, 2025
DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York: As another psychoanalyst it gives me pleasure to hear this paper. As a psychoanalyst, and one who has done most of his work with the delusions. of the insane, I must say that I have felt all along that psychoanalysis fails utterly when it tries to account for the manifest content of a delusion.
I have published cases in which recurrent attacks of some years duration were removed by means which considered only the metebolesia. DR. JOHN T. MACCURDY, New York: I have held the opinion for some years that the study of epilepsy was going to be of greater psychiatric moment than that of any other condition. I feel that this promise has been very largely fulfilled by the work Dr.
It is the place of this "instinct" in the causes and moods of war that we must consider. War is a social phenomenon: it is a movement directed toward an object, but the force that drives the movement is of course social. Several writers, among them MacCurdy , Murray , and Trotter , have dealt with this social aspect of war, and have interpreted war as a herd reaction.
Jelliffe said he was quite in sympathy with what Dr. MacCurdy had been saying, with reference to the need for formulation: We all know how these formulations have grown and how they are utilized practically. For instance, we formulate an attitude towards space. We wish to handle space and say 3 ft. or 7 ft. in order to handle space relations.
That primitive passions for violence, as MacCurdy maintains, reënforce the herd antagonism, and in the midst of the apprehension at the threat of war, give rise to a desire for war, may be true, but such primitive passions are not all of the forces that are at work in causing modern wars.
MacCurdy speaks of the paradox of human nature seen in the fact that the loyalty we call patriotism, which may make a man a benefactor to the whole race, may become a menace to mankind when it is narrowly focussed. Novicow says that what shall be foreign is a purely conventional matter. Another writer remarks that patriotism is the guise under which the instincts of tiger and wolf run riot.
Play in general, too, we now regard as reversionary, and I cannot but believe that many delusions are precisely the same. DR. TOM A. WILLIAMS, Washington, D. C: Dr. Hall has cited the cat-phobia in illustration that the belief that Dr. MacCurdy developed may be one in which there may be philogenetic reasons for the phenomena.
MacCurdy has suggested tentatively that the epileptic convulsion may be secondary to a very sudden loss of consciousness which removes a normal inhibition on the muscles, liberating the muscular contractions which constitute the convulsion.
Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery. MacCurdy and others think of war as a mental or a social disease. Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil.
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