Bernstein's Method

BERNSTEIN'S METHOD, a system of experimental psychological tests proposed by A. N. Bernstein for the examination of the psyche of mentally ill patients. Bernstein proceeded from the idea that the ordinary quantitative experiment, which sets as its task only the measurement of mental products, is unsuitable for determining the formal features of mental functioning that characterize individual forms of psychoses, since quantitatively identical results in performing the same tasks do not testify to an identical mechanism of operation. He calls his methods, in contrast to measuring ones, formulating, and sets as their goal to establish not the degree, but the schema of the disorder, revealing it, mainly, on the basis of studying the path by which the subject arrives at the solution to a task. Bernstein refuses to artificially isolate the results of activity from abstract abilities or properties of the psyche and strives to investigate those concrete mental complexes that are determined by the framework of the method itself. On the basis of the results of research using his methods, Bernstein constructed a number of schemas of the experimental symptomatology of mental diseases and attempted to apply them for the differential diagnosis of psychoses. The methodology of Bernstein itself, mainly, boils down to tasks involving various operations with pictures and texts. Bernstein proposes conducting the investigation in the following order: 1) perception: recognition of colors and simple images (things, colored images of objects, etc.); 2) assimilation: definition of simple actions depicted in a drawing (a person dressing, a woman sweeping the floor, etc.); 3) comprehension: understanding the meaning of more or less complex pictures or a series of sequential drawings depicting different phases of one and the same event (a boy falling into a well, a peasant getting drunk, riding drunk, falling from a sleigh, etc.), as well as understanding stories that present one or another difficulty; 4) combination: assembling cut-up pictures, as well as solving arithmetic problems involving addition and multiplication; 5) comparison: solving problems involving division and subtraction, filling in missing words and syllables in a coherent text, arranging in order pictures representing the gradual increase of some phenomenon, etc.; 6) criticism: finding absurdities in pictures specially selected for this purpose; 7) attention: solving problems involving sequential subtraction and counting colored beads, in greater or lesser numbers, more or less closely arranged in various fields; 8) memory: finding just-seen linear figures among others similar to them, memorizing texts, as well as series of individual words or nonsense syllables; 9) associative processes: free associations, Jung's method; 10) motor reaction: rapid counting by pointing with a finger at multicolored stars arranged along one horizontal line, either in succession or with the selection of any one color. The most important differential types of task performance identified by Bernstein relate to combination. Bernstein distinguishes between the synthetic and analytic types of the latter. The synthetic type is characterized by the fact that patients begin work without any plan, trying one element against another based on random considerations, while the analytic type is characterized by the presence of an initial analysis of the elements from which one must build this or that combination. The former is characteristic of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and the analytic type is characteristic of general paralysis in the initial stages, and to a lesser extent, of circular psychosis. As a simple and convenient way of registering certain aspects of the mental status, Bernstein's method has retained its significance at the present time, although Bernstein's differential-diagnostic constructs have not met with sympathy and have not found application in clinical practice.