by Margaret Lowenfeld

Address to the Philosophical and Psychological Society

The difficulty which faces every student of the human mind, whether he be philosopher, psychologist, anthropologist or clinical psycho-pathologist, is that the object to be observed and the instrument of observation are of the same nature. It is only with one’s own mind that one can observe either one’s own mind or behaviour or the behaviour and minds of other people.

All serious study of the nature of ourselves as human beings finds itself confronted with the same difficulty as faced the physician up to the middle of the last century, before the physical discoveries that led to the microscope and the laboratory. Since the object of study and the instrument of contemplation are so fundamentally the same, there is no means of abstracting samples of the object to be studied as one now can a blood sample or a specimen of any secretion, so that it can be examined quietly and at leisure apart from the circumstances of its production.