diately an image is formed in my brain, it is a functional entity, the picture of my comrade X. We differentiate in this entity ("molecule") three components ("radicals"); sensory perceptions, intellectual components (ideas, memory pictures, judgments, etc.) and emotional tone.[1] These three components are firmly united, so that if the memory picture alone of X comes to the surface the elements appertaining to it are regularly always with it. The sensory perception is represented by an accompanying centrifugal stimulation of the sensory spheres concerned. I am therefore justified in speaking here of a functional entity.
Through some thoughtless gossip of comrade X, I once became involved in a very unpleasant affair, the consequences of which I suffered for a long time. This affair embraces a large number of associations (it can be compared to a body made up of a number of molecules), many persons, things and events are contained therewith. The functional entity "my comrade" is only one figure among many. The entire mass of memory has a definite feeling tone, a vivid feeling of anger. Every molecule participates in this feeling tone, so that as a rule it is always accompanied by this feeling, whether appearing alone or in connection with others, and the more identified it becomes with this great union the greater is the feeling tone.[2]
I once witnessed the following incident: I was taking a walk with a very sensitive and hysterical gentleman. The village bells were pealing a new and very harmonious chime. My companion,
- ↑ Compare Bleuler, l. c., p. 5. "Just as we are able to distinguish in every sensation of light, even in the very simplest one, between quality, intensity, and saturation, so we may speak of processes of cognition, of feeling, of will, though we are well aware that no psychic process exists to which all three qualities are not common, even if it is now one, now the other that is in the foreground."
Bleuler therefore divides the "psychic forms" into preponderantly intellectual, preponderantly effective, and preponderantly voluntary.
- ↑ This can be directly compared to Wagnerian music. The leitmotif designates (in a measure like the feeling tone) an important complex presentation of the dramatic construction (such as Walhalla, Vertrag, etc.). Whenever an action or speech incites this or that complex, the leitmotif appertaining to it immediately resounds in some variation. It is exactly the same in ordinary psychological life. The leitmotif is the emotional tone of our complexes; our actions and moods are nothing but variations of our leitmotif.
