Mario Ponzo

Mario Ponzo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Honorary President of the Italian Society of Psychology of which he had been attive President in 1942-1958, died in his seventy-eighth year in Rome, after a long illness, on January 9, 1960.
Born in Milan on June 23, 1882, of a Piemontese family, he studied medicine at Turin, contemporaneously beginning his psychological train­ing in the strict school of Friedrich Kiesow, a student of Wundt.
In 1906 Ponzo obtained his medicai degree and in 1911 was appointed Docent in psychology, remaining for some twenty-five years the assistant of his master, Friedrich Kiesow.
Called to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Rome, in 1931, Ponzo succeeded Sante De Sanctis in the chair of psychology after the year in which it was held by the latter\'s pupil, Ferruccio Banissoni. Ponzo held this post and directed the attached Institore until 1952, when he reached retiring age for a staff-professor. He continued for the usual additional five years as a professor of psychology not on the staff. In 1958 he was given the title of Professor Emeritus.
From 1931 to 1952 he was also lecturer in psychology at the Faculties of Philosophy and Law.
He was a member of various non-Italian psychological societies, a foreign associate of the American Psychological Association, an honorary member of the Hungarian and German Societies of Psychology, and of the International Association of Applied Psychology. He also took an attive part in many national and international congresses, those held in North America, including the Congresses at New Haven (1929) and Montreal (1954).
In addition, he was co-editor of various Italian psychological reviews and contributed to some non-Italian periodicals, including Psychological Abstracts and Psychological Reports.
Ponzo left atout 280 publications. He busied himself with botti gen­eral and applied psychology. Indeed he always maintained the essential unity of psychology, that pure and applied research complete one another and are interdependent. In everything he did, he exhibited intense ac­tivity as scholar, research-worker, and organizer.
Let us examine some of the subjects in generai and experimental psychology, in which Ponzo specially developed his dynamic teleologic func­tional principles.
Sensory and perceptual processes. A group of very early researches, encouraged by Kiesow, are of a histological nature and concern the distribution of the faste buds in the pharynx from the choanae to the upper esophagus. Later this led to his psy­chophysiological interpretation of the act of swallowing as an example of a pur­posive perceptive-motor synthesis. As further examples of this synthesis, Ponzo examined some after-effects produced in the blind\'s tactile-kinetic perception of rigid forms. In other researches he pointed out the errors, and some illusory phe­nomena accompanying them, that occur when the subject ís asked to localize the point of application of the stimuli of touch, pain, and heat, especially when some cutaneous areas stimulated are artificially displaced from their norma) site. For this work he devised two pieces of apparatus: a dermolocalimetet and a special esthesi­ometer.
He also took up, at various times, intuitive appreciation of the number of ele­ments united in figural complexes. He paid special attention to the changes from the sensations of weight to those of lightness, and to various concomitant illusions, regarding either the stimulus or the body, when the stimulus-always much greater than threshold-is made to decrease continuously. He found that the passage from the perception of weight to that of lightness occurs through a moment of percep­tive annulment of the stimulus. Thus, he considered reports of weight and lightness to be expressions of the rame intensive and qualitative continuum. Also, in the field of sensory-perception, he worked on after images, the action of some locai anesthetics and drugs; and the fluctuation of perceptive attention and of attention­span.
In the field of ímaginative and representative processes, Ponzo studied "collet­tive images," as he called them, that are closely allied but not equivalent to stereo­typic images, and the déja-vu. He also promoted researches finto the orientation of remote space.
Psychophyriological study of breathing. He devoted himself to the study of some phenomena of induction (consequent on the perception of external rythms) of respiratory frequency, the pneumographical analyses of the associated processes of the recognition and the naming of objects, the pneumographical signs of inhibition (both unconscious and voluntary) of verbal associative responses, the familiar pneu­mographical affinity during expressive speech, the analyses of pneumographical modifications during various forms of perceptive attention and of silent menta) activity, accompanied or not by interior formulation of speech. In these researches he sought to demonstrate that breathing should be considered not so much as a symptom or a concomitant of various psychic activities, but rather as psychophysical behavior itself, as adaptation, and also as an expression of the unity of the person in action.
Psychology of action and of the comprehension of the personality. The dynamic and teleologic path followed by Ponzo was developed by him above ali when he occupied the chair of psychology at Rome University. His first letture (1931) was entitled Present-day trendr of experimental psychology as the science of the dyna­mism of psychic )ife, and by the term, "psychology of acting" or "psychology of action," he upheld bis theoretical point of view in psychology. He argued that every action with its particular end is the expression of the whole personality, so that the single action may be chosen as the ultimate indivisible element, as the concrete functional unity from which psychology can start the study and comprehension ofthe personality itself. He insisted, however, that the action shouid be observed in its entirety, not only in its external manifestations but also in its "internal elabora­tion." The German Society of Psychology, in graceful recognition of the impor­tante of Ponzo\'s work on both external and internal actions, made him an hon­orary member on his 70th birthday.
Psychomotor processes. In the above theoretical perspective of the psychology of action, Ponzo gave an importante to motor processes which must be considered both as an expression of the integration of mental and organic activity in the in­divisible unity of the person and as a vehicle of action (psychomotricity). Thus the research undertaken by him and his assistants on "recovery time" (with its adap­tive function in simple reaction times in series), the analyses of the phases of single serial acta of tapping, group-motor operations, the motor reactions emotionally dis­turbed by unexpected stimuli (analysed by photocyclographic technique), correspond to his criteria regarding the methods for studying voluntary motor processes. "These methods," he wrote, "starting from the external form of the motor action, should aim at making clear ali that happens internally as dynamic impulses, contrasta, inhibitions and choice of voluntary action." He also promoted, in the Institute he directed, research finto instinctive animal behavior.
Ponzo also devoted himself assiduously to applied psychology. He began by interesting himself, when an alienist in Turin, in finding work for mental patients discharged from the hospital. Thereafter he studied mechanical workshops in a professional school examining individual differences in vocational aptitudes and in the training of vocational capacities. In Rome, he threw himself into educational and vocational guidante (seeking above all to establish a national standard as a safeguard against dangerous individuai initiatives). He concerned himself with the study of some specific occupational profiles, with the scientific management of labor, with the employment of disabled ex-servicemen, problems of didatics, and with adult education. More recently he took up the psychology of motion pictures and social work. For the latter, he founded a school-now in its fifteenth year-at the Institute of Psychology, University of Rome.
In his manifold activities, his fighting spirit never flagged. It was in­nate through the example and traditions of his family and was proved both in the First World War (for which he volunteered) and no less in his
long, arduous campaign for the recognition of psychology in Italy (almost incredible to many non-Italian psychologists), a campaign in which he was preceded by Kiesow and De Sanctis and then supported by Gemelli and by others. Into this effort Ponzo threw all the ardent and sometimes impulsive dynamism, which undoubtedly motivated his "psychology of action."
All the sadder, in view of his enthusiasm and vigor, was the complete inactivity forced upon him at the end by the relentless progress of his malady.
LEANDRO CANESTRELLI (University of Rome)

(From “The American Journal of Psychology”, v. 73, n. 4, december 1960, pp. 645-647).