Hypotheses toward a Unified Field Theory of Human Behavior with Clinical Application to Acne Vulgaris

HYPOTHESES TOWARD A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF HUMAN BEHA VIOR WITH CLINICAL APPLICATION TO ACNE VULGARIS* WALLACE C. ELLERBROEK, M.D.t First listen, my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster. [Aristophanes ] Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought. [Albert Szent-Györgi] Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face. [Albert Camus, The Fall] I. Introduction When we start to study a biological event or process with what we allege to be a 'scientific' attitude, we at first seem to see our subject dissolving into neatly definable factors and obvious solutions. If we stop here, we feel quite brilliant; if we hesitate and look more closely , all is confusion. One of our science-fiction writers said it well: "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it in the right way did not become still more complicated " [1, p. 59]. If we pursue the problem further, we discover that each element is part of a system and participates in multiple systems, that each of these systems interreacts with all the others, that circularity of process is typical, and that the application of nice, tight logic leads us nowhere. Since human beings usually try to reduce ambiguity rather than increase it, we rarely see that such study is additionally complicated * Editor's Note: On occasion I have accepted manuscripts for publication which do not meet our usual criteria for acceptability. This paper is an example. It represents intuitive thinking to which few restrictions have been applied. This is stated candidly by the author. This development of a model of field theory seems to me to be heuristic even if implausible.—D. J. I. t Address: P.O. Box 367, Sunset Beach, California 90742. Present affiliation: Metropolitan State Hospital, Norwalk, California. The ideas expressed herein are those of the author, and do not reflect opinions of the Department of Mental Hygiene of the State of California. 240 I Wallace C. Ellerbroek · Unified Field Theory of Human Behavior by filtering through an observer whose partial perceptions and verbal machinations are as much a part of the 'field'1 as is the subject. We may consider the observer's ability to observe as modified by the sum of his experiences since conception, his genetic background, his culture , his language, his education, and his profession, and by an infinity of other unidentified factors. When the observer is a physician, we can pragmatically predict that an internist will act and think as internists do, that a surgeon will tend to make diagnoses involving bloodshed, and that a general practitioner will do justice to his untarnished role as a slightly paranoid Atlas of the medical world. Although I was a general surgeon at the time this work was done, I tried to avoid 'thinking like a surgeon,' and spent much time reading nonmedical subjects. I learned that major breakthroughs are often made by someone far from his own domain and that attention should be paid to the criticisms and comments of those not qualified to speak as experts; since they lack la déformation professionelle, they at least may remain able to see errors in basic assumptions. (Experts on violence just might learn something from child psychologists!) I gained much from the intellectual giants of the past, as well as from the interdisciplinary workers of today. When I tried to discuss such matters with my professional associates, I found that few clinicians in private practice find the time or develop the inclination to familiarize themselves with the works of those whose names often grace these and other pages. I also learned that few physicians were aware of the relevance of such studies (Grinker, Koestler, Korzybski, von Bertalanffy, Rapaport, Dubos, and Szent-Györgi are a few examples) in their day-to-day work with their patients. When I urged personal friends to read an item outside their field, they made it clear that they were already sinking rapidly in a sea of 'contributions to the literature ' (few of which make large waves), so I could not blame them for disinterest in the advances in neuroscience and behavioral...