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Updated: September 20, 2025
Whoever preaches force as the first weapon in any struggle is either deluded as to its value or an enemy of mankind. As a non-inhibited response, force and brutality appear in the mentally sick. General paresis, cerebral arterio-selerosis, alcoholic psychoses present classical examples of the impatient brutal reaction, often in men hitherto patient and gentle.
For the present it is enough to say that with a different formulation that of wishing to die there is here not, as in other psychoses, a definite affect, such as sadness or despair, but no affect, though there may be a good deal of “push” or impulsiveness. A careful analysis of her history has been instructive and justifies a detailed and lengthy discussion.
Let us, therefore, consider the death ideas in the three cases studied in this chapter. Here it is present. So we have thoughts of the death of the mother or husband, another rival, considerable preoccupation with Heaven, and also erotic fancies. We find in manic-depressive insanity a tendency for more or less specific ideational contents with different types of the psychoses.
This defect can only be remedied by looking on every case as a problem in which the origin of each symptom is to be studied and its relation traced to all other symptoms and to the personality as a whole. This is an ambitious task and we do not pretend to any great achievement, merely to a beginning. No better psychoses could be chosen for a preliminary effort than benign stupors.
Clark has been doing for the last two years. We have found, I think, from that work that we can really shell out what we may term an epileptic reaction, which is really the most primitive of all psychiatric reaction. It corresponds to a flight from reality. It is a return to the subjective phase, which, in the psychoses, is no vague but a very real thing.
Catalepsy is an important symptom because, although it occurred in slightly less than a third of our cases, it seems to be a peculiarity of the stupor reaction found but rarely in other benign psychoses. It seems never to occur without there being some evidence of mental activity, and, consequently, we are forced to conclude that it is of mental rather than of physical origin.
If Dementia praecox postulated criminality, the situation might be different, but, as it stands, the reaction would only be of value in the doubtful cases cases which are so many of them non-institutional. With this vague conception of the psychoses it is not surprising to find that diagnosis used faute de mieux.
In fact, the shock neuroses and shock psychoses, if analyzable psychogenetically, "would be found to be reversions to, and also perhaps more often than we suspect, magnifications of acts and psychic states that were at one time the fittest of which our forebears were capable.
Throughout the volume one sees the adoption of the broad biological standpoint in mental life. The adoption of the term "biogenetic psychoses" is indicative of the general trend. The adoption of this well-chosen phrase is, I venture to suggest, the product of Dr. Meyer. The reviewer regrets that the papers do not very well lend themselves for brief reviews.
Quite similarly we should not expect in the psychoses to find evidences of regression to a given period of the individual’s life appearing exclusively, but rather we should look for reactions at any given time being determined preponderantly by the type of mentation characteristic for a given stage of his development.
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