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This does not allow itself to be satisfied with seeing only one side of the medal, it does not limit its field of activity to the superliminal consciousness, in searching for the causes of psychogenic illnesses, but it penetrates into the strata which lie hidden under the threshold of the consciousness.
Further observations are necessary to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but we feel inclined to accept it tentatively because it is plausible and consistent with the view that stupor is essentially a psychogenic type of reaction. Another physical anomaly, which is presumably of endocrine origin, is the suppression of the menses. This probably results from lowered nutrition.
If Dagonet be accepted as summarizing the early French work, we can conclude that their generalizations were on the whole quite sound. These were: that stupor is an abnormal mental reaction, usually psychogenic but often the result of exhaustion, that it consists in a paralysis of emotion, will and intelligence; that the prognosis is usually good; that mental stimulation may produce recovery.
If the resemblance amounted to identity, we would have to admit that a specific toxin may produce a specific mental reaction which we have concluded on other grounds to be psychogenic. As a matter of fact, in two particulars these reactions show relationship to organic delirium.
The essential kernel of Stekel's view is that the epileptic is a repressed criminal. The convulsion is a substitute for the criminal act. He announces categorically that pseudoepilepsy is curable by psychoanalytic procedures. Of three cases which he completely analysed, two were cured. His final conclusion is fourfold: Epilepsy, more often than we have hitherto thought, is of psychogenic origin.
Of course it leaves the problem at that interesting point, Why the restriction of consciousness? If stupor be a psychobiological reaction, it should occur, occasionally, in organic conditions just as the deliria of typhoid fever may contain many psychogenic elements. Gnauck reports such a case. The patient, a woman, was poisoned by carbon dioxide. At first there was unconsciousness.
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