by John M. Dorsey (Author)

It has been my intention to write as a psychologist seeking to study the nature of the functioning of my mind without appealing to any discipline other than that of my mind for evidence, without introducing observation from any so-called “non-psychological” source. I word my research “the psychology of physiology” instead of “the physiology of psychology.” I find my psychology is strictly my most comprehensive biological interest, hence its vital process or performance is the ideal subject for study. Since it is exclusively the individual biological functioning of mind with which I am concerned, I have viewed my province of psychology as including investigation of the organic functioning of my mind. Every original investigator eventually must run the awful risk of seeming to lead a school of followers thereby hypostatizing a so-called impersonal “movement.” It is my experience that this unconscious development of everyone devoted to “the movement” invariably results in all of the dire consequences of overlooked individuality in leader and follower alike. In a book scientifically oriented I can take nothing for granted. Least of all can I assume that my reader will have the faintest feeling for the one and only datum making sense of all of it, namely that it is merely about me. Therefore at the very outset I wish to heed this self-evident truth of truths underlying the factuality of all of the positing that follows, namely, that I solely, am the whole of my subject… [From the Author’s Introduction]