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In the tic we see a method by which the individual or organic personality has met a certain difficult or undesirable or disturbing situation. There is not such a far cry from the simplest tic to Gilles de la Tourette's disease or maladie des tics with its more pronounced signs of psychophysical deterioration and dissociation.

His lead was subsequently followed up by Brissaud, and by the latter's pupils Meige and Feindel, the latter two authors giving us a comprehensive discussion of the subject in their well-known classic. More recently the Freudian school has attempted to dig down into the roots of the tree which ultimately sends forth its branches in the guise of tics. Tics and their treatment.

A little reflection will show us the impossibility and illogicality of viewing all these conditions as being fundamentally of sexual origin. Let us follow the argument. If tics are of sexual derivation, as the Freudians here openly maintain, then it must follow that those familiar examples of compulsion, such as the obsessive impulse to touch every other post, etc., are likewise of sexual origin.

The writer cannot understand how the theory which he has taken the trouble to so fully present in the above quotations can be maintained. Jones and Clark both assert that the tics or habit spasms as probably of the same nature as the obsessions in general.

The individual, as a biological unit, is reacting to the particular situation which presents itself by the tic mechanism. By granting the phylogenetic, racial significance we also give the basic, psychophysical meaning of tics in all ticquers. How is it that these activities may come into play again? What brings them to the surface once more?

A very high proportion of older children suffering from the graver neuroses, such as chorea, syncopal attacks, phobias, tics, and so forth, show defective physical development. Scoliosis, lordosis, knock-knee, flat foot, pigeon chest, albuminuria, cold and cyanosed extremities, are the rule rather than the exception.

The animal kingdom consists, first, of a sub-kingdom of animals which possess a spinal column, or backbone, and which are known as vertebrate animals. Such are all beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. There is, further, an immense group of arthropods, consisting of all insects, crab-like creatures, hundred-legs and their allies, with spiders, scorpions, tics and mites.

Tics, it is true, are especially apt to develop in individuals with a neuropathic or psychopathic history or heredity. In other cases this history is not obtainable, the individual having been apparently perfectly normal up to the time of the outcropping of the tic.

Surely the motive source is fundamentally the same in all of these conditions. Furthermore, tics occur in animals, especially in horses; and the whole picture, physical and mental, of tics in horses resembles that which we find in human beings, particularly idiots and imbeciles, with tics.

Such is the case with insanity, with epilepsy, with hemophilia, or "bleeders," and with certain rare and curious disturbances of the nervous system, such as the hereditary ataxias and "tics" of various sorts.