Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING AND SOCIAL WORK-MEYER I95

that was to my mind the fundamental contribution and stroke of genius of the movement.
Freud's concepts arose from the attempt to understand the principles at work in
hysteria and in other abnormal and unusual conditions which do not conform with the
usual formulations of human life. Back of the supposedly banal realities of ordinary
human experience Freud had the courage to see a latent unconscious reality in the
form of mankind's struggle for happiness reflecting itself in the individual life; and
especially in the naive dream more personally expressed than in socialized waking life.
Freud was led to see in the dream the very revelation of the individual's nature, because
it carries on a kind of disguising of reality in a manner of hide and seek that has made
its use in the old quest for a secret of the real nature of man all the more tempting.
Freud, made an involuntary psychologist of every human being, a betrayer rather than
a revealer of his own nature, and he assured for himself a widespread interest through
his working with the dream, the very activity that had intrigued man for ages and
aroused all the curiosity modern man seems to need to turn his interest to a fact as
common as human nature. Instead of generalities and abstract concepts, he used the
similarly intriguing concrete facts of sex-life as the bearers of all the forces at work, and
released all the pent-up curiosity and eagerness of talk and fascination required for a
sensation. Freud's theory has proved most fruitful, fascinating, and stimulating
where plain, common sense could not make an impression. It has the vital elements
that were lacking in most other efforts: it is intensely dynamic and speaks of absolute
determination of life in contrast to the peculiarly timid evasion of casual thinking in
most psychologies.
Unfortunately, while Freud has given us a broadening and humanizing of our conception of mentality, his theories have also tended to fix in the minds of many certain
questionable obsessions in their philosophy of life, from which we would be glad to be
freed, so as to be able to turn to more neutral ground again. The consequence of these
modern psychometric and psycho-analytic developments was: on the one hand, a
tendency to rule-of-thumb measurements, unfortunately largely neglecting, if not
belittling, the personality features, just as had been done by the soul-shy and mindshy factions of academic psychology; on the other hand, a humanizing psychology, but,
unfortunately, one getting its impetus largely from the lessons of mythology and hysteria, where we might prefer a confident front attack upon average man as we all should
know him.
In connection with psychiatric work, but from an angle quite different from Freudism, there had developed during the last twenty-five years a less spectacular objective
psycho-biology, which may well furnish an obligatory background of any dependable
scientific understanding of mentality, including that needed for social work and law.
The chief point in this conception of objective psycho-biology is that it looks for an
understanding of mentality which does not merely see intelligence tests or a reduction
of man's life to sex and to the unconscious, but begins with and turns back again to a
frank and reasonably balanced review of man's responsiveness and his positive and
negative assets in the form of specific samples from the whole wide range of practical
performance. It surveys, according to the extent of specific demand, the jobs and
recreations, the interests and ambitions, personal, educational, civic and political,
moral and religious, and the balance of actual performance and ambitions and opportunity, as shown best in concrete performance, but also, and I want to emphasize this