[258] worked with brain-injured people (he is a neurologist) who showed characteristics which gave a key to the functioning of an integrated mind. This functioning was reduced, in the brain-injured, to very special limits. These limits can be described exactly and scientifically. In these descriptions it came out that one function was reduced more than anything else, the function of abstraction^a, which is the great function of the human mind on which language is based. The brain-injured cannot transcend the limits of his reduced existence. He has no world any more, he has given environments. To these given environments, he can adapt himself very well, but he can do so only with the help of others who can put him into these limited surroundings; he cannot transcend the real for the possible. This, for instance, has one advantage: these people cannot lie, they cannot say a lie, and they cannot understand if someone says something that is obviously a lie. If one of these people were here and I would ask him to repeat the sentence "The sun is shining now," he would not be able to. You WOULD be (although it does not shine); you can lie, but they cannot because they are bound to the concrete situation and are not able to transcend it. And if you try to FORCE them to say such a sentence, they have what Goldstein^b calls a catastrophic reaction; they fall into a tremendous state of anxiety and almost self-destruction. Now this shows that man has the possibility of transcending himself. This was another element which was added to the gestalt ^cpsychology, it was the psychology of spontaneity^d in terms of the possibility of self-transcendence. Out of this, another insight followed, namely the insight into the nature of the spontaneity^e