Abnormal psychology provides a double-barrelled benefit to its devotees; for it is not only a field which calls forth all one's resources of imaginative empathy and ordering reason; but it exposes the self to the self. In every psychosis one sees fragmentary versions of oneself dissected out by disease. This leads inevitably to self-revelation and progressive insights. Metaphorically speaking, such experiences expand consciousness. In James' language "I the Knower" looks into the psychic mirror and sees a larger "Me the Known".
May Awake Students
It may turn out, moreover, that abnormal psychology will contribute to the cultural life of the university in yet another way. It may be the key to the cerebral lock of some individuals whose intellectual potentialities can be opened by no other instrument. It is a matter of common observation that, although there are some students who come to college with an enlightened zest for intellectual pursuits and others who will be forever incapable of such experiences, there are many, not without potentialities, who go through the university unscorched by the cultural torch.
Youth is characteristically in search of subjects that have the ingredients of liveliness; subjects that appeal to their imaginations. They have a special predilection for "new" subjects; and if a new subject, no matter what its nature, can start a young man on the road to the intellectual life it is fulfilling an important function. Discipline may be provided by other courses, physical chemistry let us say.
Americans Lack Culture
Most Americans come to college without cultural background, without an intimation that the contemplative factor in life is one of the supreme experiences, even more thrilling than kicking a goal from the field in the stadium. Psychopathology, because it is a new subject, and because it deals with the spirit of man in all its vigorous vagaries, progressive and regressive, and hence is the subject par excellence for the pre-occupation of man, has the necessary explosives for lighting the intellectual fuse in the minds of at least some undergraduates. No young man should go through college unburned. It does not make a great deal of difference what subject infects him first; he should be infected. He may then proceed on his own fuel. Once the taste of blood, always a hunter. Let a man once smack his lips on abnormal psychology and it will lead him to the end of his days on a hunt through all the cultural activities of man to find an answer to his questions. For abnormal psychology, since it deals with all extremes of human activity, the mind behaviour of the criminal as well as the rotarian and the genius, ramifies into all attitudes and objectifications of the human soul. It is preoccupied with hysteria and visions, hence religious conversions, hence ecstasy, hence creative fervor, hence the poetry of William Black. It delves into the obsessional neuroses, hence witchcraft, hence persecutions, hence the devil voices of Cotton Mather. There is no end to it.
I have been furnishing you for the most part with rationalizations. If you ask me why abnormal psychology is at Harvard, perhaps the true answer, is that; "we're here because we're here". And if you ask me for what good are we, I might retort in the words of Benjamin Franklin: "What good is a new born babe?" an "enfant terrible" though it be.