Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/113

p. JANKT AND F. RAYMOND, Nevroses et Iddcs Fixes. 99 to eat " were really memories of desperate resolutions taken some years ago. " Aujourd'hui ces idees se reproduisent sans lien entre elles et sans raison " (p. 25). We thus arrive at " psycho- logical automatism " reproduction of the past, without actual synthesis relative to the given situation. To relate these ideas to aboulia. Dr. Janet, after criticising M. Paulhan's explanation " association par contrasts " concludes that there must exist further intellectual trouble and analyses the perceptions, includ- ing intelligence, memory, imagination. As with movements, so here, the result is " incapacite de synthetiser les impressions nouvelles, qu'elles viennent du dedans ou du dehors " (p. 48). Following on this, there is great division of personality. " Chaque idee fixe forme une sorte de personne qui n'a aucune pensee, aucun souvenir en dehors de la pensee dominante " (p. 60). The displacing of some fixed ideas by others, the revealing of stratifica- tions of fixed ideas, the general improvement under treatment, all tend to verify the hypothesis of primary exhaustion, followed by defective synthetic power, and dissociation. The detailed justifi- cation of these positions would take too much space to summarise ; but the case illustrates all the leading principles of the volume. Here the terms that demand analysis are such as synthesis and neurosis. Every integration of elements into an operative organisation is synthesis, whether the elements be physical or psychical. But Dr. Janet intends rather to express the power of concentrating idea-systems for an object, and perhaps his meaning is almost expressed by the term voluntary attention. Let this power lapse and dissociation follows. The term synthesis, how- ever, is so mixed up with purely metaphysical associations that it is apt, in psychology, to convey something more than psychological terms, as such, have any title to convey. The instances given are enough to show that Dr. Janet is thinking steadily in the province of positive psychology, not in the province of metaphysics. Then as to neurosis. That mainly " functional" disorders are chosen, that partial or total, temporary or permanent, restorations of function are possible in the cases chosen, and that the apparent loss of function is frequently shown to be only the submerging of the function, all tend to indicate that neurosis may be taken in its accepted meaning disorder of function without permanent disorder of structure. The line that divides the two disorders cannot be drawn a priori; it must be inferred from the kind of result got in analysis and treatment. After all, structure, in the ultimate analysis, is arrangement of elements nerve elements, neurons, associating fibres, neurogleia, etc., and function is the working of just this arrangement so long as it has elasticity enough always to recover itself. If the elasticity disappears, the function lapses ; but then can the structure be any longer regarded as just the same ? Where by no imaginable process of stimulation, or righting of mechanism, is the elasticity to be restored, as, e.g., in degeneration of motor centres from a blood-clot, there the