A matter of quality: Kurt Goldstein‘s assessment of the abstract attitude after brain damage

ABSTRACT Neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) made substantial contributions to neuropsychology in general and to the development of tests for the assessment of brain damage sequelae in particular. Unlike present-day neuropsychology’s psychometric orientation, Goldstein kept a critical distance to a mere quantitative evaluation. Eighty years ago, he impressively demonstrated his own, qualitatively oriented diagnostic approach both in a remarkable monograph and in a didactic film, in collaboration with psychologist Martin Scheerer (1900-1961). By modifying a classical paradigm for the assessment of deficits in visuospatial construction, the Block Design Test, the two authors developed the Goldstein-Scheerer Cube Test. This version characterizes itself by offering the patient different types of cues in order to reveal the nature of the deficit at stake. The test remains an impressive illustration of Goldstein’s most famous neuropsychological concept, viz. the human ability to abstract from a concrete situation: the abstract (or categorial) attitude.

“The Most Important Thing”

May returns to New York when recovery is far enough along. He begins a private counseling practice, where he excels in empathy with patients and encourages a gay patient to remain gay if that is what he chooses to be. He also writes a doctoral dissertation on anxiety and begins again an analysis with Erich Fromm at the White Institute, where he also consults with Clara Thompson. In addition to Kierkegaard, Fromm’s work as well as that of Kurt Goldstein influenced the dissertation. He quickly publishes it in 1950 as The Meaning of Anxiety, a book notable for its comprehensiveness, its link of creativity with anxiety, and for May its lack of religious content. May’s father dies just before he publishes The Meaning of Anxiety and almost instantly becomes a major force in the emerging profession of psychotherapy.

“The More Difficult War Within”

Soon May was in transition from the ministry to becoming a psychotherapist. He enrolled in a counseling program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and did coursework at a new psychoanalytic institute. Tillich introduced him to many German émigrés: Kurt Goldstein, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. His mentor also involved him in a private seminar on psychology and religion. May also wrote articles for various popular religious journals to bolster spirits during the war. He himself was disqualified from the draft because of a heart murmur.

The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism

Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The Organism ([1934] 1939) by the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. With this background in place, we see that some brief but spirited criticisms of cybernetics by two later thinkers much influenced by Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem (1963) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1961), show continuity with the earlier discussions of abstraction in science.

A representação científica do comportamento: Merleau-Ponty e a crítica à fisiologia clássica.

No presente artigo, analisamos a gênese e a extensão das críticas realizadas por Merleau-Ponty, em sua obra A Estrutura do Comportamento, à fisiologia clássica, representada pela teoria do reflexo de Ivan Pavlov. Merleau-Ponty se apropria da fisiologia contemporânea, especialmente do pensamento de Kurt Goldstein, para questionar a centralidade teórica e experimental ocupada pela noção de reflexo nos estudos experimentais sobre o comportamento. Trata-se de investigar os limites da teoria reflexológica, expondo a insuficiência do método como explicação objetiva do comportamento. Pretendemos explicitar que a interlocução com o campo da fisiologia não sinaliza, nesta obra, uma atitude de afastamento dos problemas filosóficos, mas expressa o movimento necessário de revisão epistemológica e metodológica tanto das ciências naturais, como da própria filosofia.

On Pain as a Distinct Sensation: Mapping Intensities, Affects, and Difference in ‘Interior States’

A recent widely reported study found that some participants would prefer to self-administer a small electric shock than be bored. This flawed study serves as a departure point to diagram pain and sensation beyond the boundaries of the individual body, consisting of four sections. First, in terms of laboratory-based experimentation and auto-experimentation with pain, there is a long history of viewing pain and touch through introspective means. Second, later theories of pain successively widened the scope of the physiological mechanisms and external influences on the organism, such as Melzack and Wall’s cybernetics-influenced gate control theory. Third, we briefly consider the nervous system as a homeostatic system, which finds an historical parallel in explanations of the milieu intérieur of the organism, via Claude Bernard and Kurt Goldstein. Fourth, pain helps tip the organism as a whole from perception to action, but also operates beyond the organism as a biopsychosocial phenomenon.