Gobierno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires

Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico "Dr. José Tiburcio Borda"

Laboratorio de Investigaciones Electroneurobiológicas

y Revista

Electroneurobiología

ISSN: ONLINE 1850-1826 - PRINT 0328-0446

The Biological Psychology of José Ingenieros,

some biographical points, and

Wilhelm Ostwald’s (Nobel Prize Chemistry, 1909)

Introduction to the 1922 German edition

by

Lazaros C. Triarhou

Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of Educational Policy,

University of Macedonia, Thessalónica 54006, Greece

Contacto / correspondence: triarhou[-at]uom.gr

and

Manuel del Cerro

Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology & Anatomy and Ophthalmology,

University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14642, USA

Electroneurobiología 2006; 14 (3), pp. 115-195; URL <http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/index2.htm>

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Received: 31 May 2006 Accepted: 30 June 2006

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SUMMARY: One of the earliest recorded works in Biological Psychology was published in 1910 by Argentinian psychiatrist José Ingenieros (1877-1925), Professor of Experimental Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. Ingenieros, a multifaceted personality and prolific author and educator, has been considered a ‘luminary’ for young generations, ahead of his time, and was famous for his lapidary aphorisms. Physician, philosopher and political activist, he was the first psychologist who tried to establish a comprehensive psychological system in South America. His long list of publications includes 484 articles and 47 books, which are generally categorized in two periods: studies in mental pathology and criminology (1897-1908) and studies in philosophy, psychology and sociology (1908-1925). Some of his books continue to be published and to be best-sellers in the Spanish-speaking world; however, his works were never particularly available to English-speaking audiences. In the present study we present an overview of Ingenieros’ life and work, and an account of his profoundly interesting work Principios de Psicología Biologica, in which he analyzes the development, evolution and social context of mental functions. It is a hope, eighty years after his death, to bibliographically resurrect this ardent champion of reason in the English biomedical and psychological literature. We also provide the original German and an English translation of the Introduction contributed by Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) to the 1922 German edition of Ingenieros’ Biological Psychology, pertinent to the energetic principles Ingenieros adopted and the study of Psychology as a natural science.

1. Introduction

Fig. 1. José Ingenieros (1877-1925). Portrait from cover of special issue of Nosotros (Editorial, 1925b). The signature in the lower frame is from the dedication of doctoral thesis by Ingenieros to his friend Emilio Zuccarini.

José Ingenieros (Fig. 1), one of Argentina’s estimable intellectuals, continues to be a highly read author in Latin America to this day. Dubbed by del Forno (1950) ‘luminary of a generation’ (Fig. 2), Ingenieros has illuminated with his ideas the way to generations of intellectuals, and continues doing so today. The scope of the present study, a different version of which has already been published (Triarhou and del Cerro, 2006) is two-fold. First, to introduce to the English biomedical literature this champion of reason, at a time when the light of reason appears pretty dim on much of a ‘daemon-haunted world’ (Sagan, 1996); second, to ‘rediscover’ one of his earlier works, the ‘Principles of Biological Psychology’ (Principios de Psicología Biológica) (Ingenieros, 1913a), dating back to 1910 (Ingenieros, 1910b). That work went through six editions in Spanish (Ingenieros, 1916a, 1919, 1937, 1946), and was also translated in French (Ingenieros, 1914a) and German (Ingenieros, 1922a). Being the first effort in South America to attempt to establish a comprehensive psychological system, the work places special emphasis on the biological basis of mental phenomena.

Fig. 2. Front page of lecture by del Forno (1950), with handwritten dedication to Ingenieros’ daughter Cecilia.

Although it is not within the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive review of the evolution of the field of Biological Psychology as a discipline – there are numerous books and papers which do that (e.g. Reed, 1997; Rosenzweig et al., 1999; Birbaumer and Schmidt, 2003; Schandry, 2003) – we nonetheless note two landmark publications from two other pioneers in the brain sciences. In a remarkable confluence, 1895 was an annus mirabilis for coupling psychology with neurohistology, having seen the light of two independently conceived works on neurobiological schemes of mental phenomena: Cajal’s ‘Conjectures on the anatomical mechanism of ideation, association and attention’ (Ramón Cajal, 1895), and Freud’s posthumously published theoretical treatise Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1966).

In a striking convergence of ideas, Freud, like Cajal, in the wake of certain theory of sleep being caused by brain cells' amoeboidism, postulated that learning might produce prolonged changes in the effectiveness of the connections between neurons and that such changes could subserve a mechanism for memory. Updated, this view is still entertained by neuroscientists as Eric Kandel (1981). Moreover, Freud (1966), in a manner relevant to the scope of Ingenieros’ Psychology, wrote: “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychic processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction”. According to Barondes (1993), Freud had in mind that the units of such a natural science, the ‛specifiable material particles’, would be neurons, the cells of the nervous system, whose structure and organization he had helped elucidate in his extensive neuroanatomical studies (Triarhou and del Cerro, 1985; Shepherd and Erulkar, 1997; Guttman and Scholz-Strasser, 1998; Pearce, 2003; Ochs, 2004).

In the aftermath of the fin du siècle physicochemical and neurobiological repercussions on psychology, books on ‘Biological Psychology’ develop and expand ideas present in the writings of José Ingenieros. In the German literature there are the works of Lungwitz (1925), Bleuler (1932) and Leonhard (1961), and the more modern accounts of Birbaumer and Schmidt (1989), Köhler (2001), Gall et al. (2002), and Schandry (2003). In the French literature, one finds the works of Delmas-Marsalet (1961) and Pellet (1999). Likewise, in the English literature, one encounters works by McDowall (1941), Kimble (1973), Groves and Schlesinger (1979), Kalat (1980), Hall (1983), Klein (1999), Rosenzweig et al. (1999), Wickens (1999), Toates (2001), Martin (2003), Pinel (2003), and Weiner et al. (2003).

In Ingenieros’ Principios we come upon the scheme of a synthetic system of psychology weaved from positivist philosophy – with a heavy emphasis on the science of experience – and the principles of physical chemistry, and inditing the phenomena of psychic functioning at the ontogenetic, evolutionary and social levels, while leaving some room for metaphysics. At a time when Psychology was still closely associated with Philosophy, from which it had sprung – or which, according to another view, it had actually spawned (Reed, 1997) – efforts to draw it towards the principles of biological energetics and biological generative processes should be welcomed with today’s perspective.

It is refreshing, to say the least, to find a clear proposition for psychology as a natural science, presented almost a century ago by a highly learned and copious writer of opera that span from politics to philosophy, through the way of neurology, psychiatry, psychology, criminology, history, critical essay, morals and sociology. In our opinion, Ingenieros deserves a place in the tradition of physician-psychologists – quod vide Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Bechterew, Sigmund Freud, Eugen Bleuler, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung, Jean Piaget and the akin all the way to Eric Kandel – who have made valuable contributions to the emergence of psychology as a biological science during its formative years in the 19th and in the 20th centuries. We trust that the present report and its predecessor (Triarhou and del Cerro, 2006) may signal the proper historical placement of Principios among key historical works in Biological Psychology.

We provide the complete ‘synthetic conclusions’ of Ingenieros from the first Spanish edition (Ingenieros, 1913a) and a translation of Ostwald’s introductory commentary from the German edition (Ingenieros, 1922a). We also provide some biographical data on Ingenieros and Wilhelm Ostwald. Ostwald was the German chemist and philosopher, Nobel Prize winner who contributed the Introduction to the German edition of Principios, and whose physical theories Ingenieros refers to in five of the ten chapters of his book.

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2. Life and work of José Ingenieros (1877-1925)

2.1. Biographical note

Numerous biographies of José Ingenieros have been published (Barreda, 1925; Colmo, 1925; de la Mendoza, 1925; Fernández, 1925; Bermann, 1925; 1926; 1929; 1933; Mouchet, 1925; Mouchet and Palcos, 1925; Ramos, 1925; Schiaffino, 1925; Zavalla, 1925; Riaño Jauma, 1933; del Forno, 1950; Bagu, 1953; 1963; Ponce, 1957; Torchia-Estrada, 1967; Gottheld, 1969a; 1969b; Laplaza, 1977; Ardila 1989; Rodriguez Kauth, 1996; Díaz Araujo, 1998; Murillo-Ramos, 2001). Furthermore, Ingenieros’ daughter, writer Delia Ingenieros de Rothschild (pseudonym Delia Kamia), produced an ‘Anthology’ (Kamia, 1961), which also contains a biographical note. A synoptic timeline of Ingenieros’ life and corresponding world events is given in Table 1.

José Ingenieros was one of two sons – Pablo was the other – of Salvador (don Salvatore) Ingegnieros (1848-1922) and Mariana (doña Ana) Tagliavía, a family – including Tagliavía’s father José – of revolutionary tradition and friends of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Malatesta. Although there is not a perfect agreement in the available records (reviewed in detail by Díaz Araujo, 1998), the most likely scenario is that ‘Giuseppe Ingegnieros’ was born on 24 April 1877 at Vía Candelaí № 45, Palermo, Sicily (Fig. 3). The original last name of the family, Ingenieros, was Spanish in origin, and had been ‘semi-italianized’ to Ingegnieros at the time of emigration to Sicily prior to Salvador’s birth there; it was ‘re-castillianized’ by José Ingenieros after 1912 for his European publications.

	Ingenieros’ life and work	Events in science and the world scene
1900	Graduates from Medical School; H.G. Piñero establishes Psychological Laboratory at University of Buenos Aires	Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung; Max Planck develops quantum theory; Lewandowsky coins term ‘blood-brain barrier’
1902	Founds Archivos de Criminología, Medicina Legal y Psiquiatría	Kennelly and Heaviside discover ionosphere; Cuba becomes independent from Spain
1903	Publishes Simulación de la Locura and La Simulación en la Lucha por la Vida	De Vries discovers mutations in plants; Wright brothers make first successful flight; Panama gains independence
1904	Appointed Professor of Psychology; awarded National Academy of Medicine Gold Medal	Pavlov awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine; Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)
1905	Travels to Europe (1905-1906). Entertains racist views about the poor, the Black, etc., later rejected.	Einstein publishes Special theory of relativity; Norway peacefully gains independence from Sweden
1906	Returns to Buenos Aires	Cajal and Golgi awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine; Jakob starts modelling brain higher functions on the interference of stationary waves; Sherrington publishes Integrative action of the nervous system
1907	Founds Instituto de Criminología de la Penitenciaría Nacional	Mauritania makes maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York; Russian Alexander Scriabin composes Le Poème de l’Extase
1908	Professor or Experimental Psychology; forms Sociedad de Psicología; publishes Sociología Argentina	Austrian Gustav Mahler composes ninth symphony; Salvador Allende born in Valparaiso
1909	Elected President of Argentina Medical Association	Ostwald awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Brodmann publishes Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Großhirnrinde; Freud visits Clark University
1910	Separate chapters of Psicología Genética appear in Argentina Médica; article Psicología Biologica appears in Archivos	William James dies in Chocorua, N.H.; Titchener publishes A text-Book of Psychology; Mexican Revolution (1910-1917); Portugal proclaimed a Republic; Tolstoy dies near Caucasus
1911	Publishes Psicología Genética; self-exile to Europe (1911-1914)	Cajal’s Histologie du système nerveux published in Paris; Jakob publishes a brain circuit better known on Papez' 1937 description; Bleuler coins term ‘schizophrenia’
1912	Visits European Universities	Balkan Wars (1912-1913); Titanic sinks
1913	Principios de Psicología Biológica and El Hombre Mediocre published in Madrid	Watson publishes article in Psychological Review; Albert Schweitzer builds Lambaréné Hospital in Gabon
1914	Marries Eva Rutenberg; Principes de Psychologie Biologique published in Paris	Cajal completes publication of Degeneration and regeneration in Madrid with support from Spanish physicians of Argentina; outbreak of WW I
1915	Founds Revista de Filosofía	Romain Rolland awarded Nobel Prize in Literature; Lusitania torpetoed by German U-boat off coast of Ireland
1916	Attends Washington, D.C. conference; publishes Criminología; fifth edition of Principios de Psicología in Buenos Aires	Einstein publishes General theory of relativity; Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera born; Britannic sunk after striking mine in Aegean Sea
1917	Professor of Ethics; publishes Hacia una Moral sin Dogmas	D’Arcy Thompson publishes Growth and form; Russian Bolshevik Revolution
1918	Publishes Proposiciones Relativas al Porvenir de la Filosofía	Max Planck awarded Nobel Prize in Physics; end of WW I
1919	Meets President Hipólito Yrigoyen; sixth (final) edition of Principios de Psicología published in Buenos Aires	Watson publishes Psychology from the standpoint of a behaviorist; Treaty of Versailles signed
1921	Publishes Los Tiempos Nuevos	Einstein awarded Nobel Prize in Physics; Argentinian composer Ariel Ramírez born
1922	Father dies. Writes Las Fuerzas Morales.