If a strong complex exists, there results a cessation of progress adapted to the environment, and associations gyrate altogether about the complex. This is generally so in hysteria where we meet the strongest complexes. The progress of personality is suspended and a great part of the psychic activity is spent in dressing the complex in every possible form (symptom-actions). It is not in vain that Janet calls attention to the general disturbances of the "obsédé," of which I will mention the following: "l'indolence, l'irrésolution, les retards, la fatigue, l'inachèvement, l'aboulie, l'inhibition, etc."[1] If a complex succeeds in fixing itself, monotony results, especially the monotony of external symptoms. Who does not know the stereotyped and tiring complaints of hysterics? the obstinacy and invincibility of their symptoms? Just as a constant pain will always call forth the same monotonous plaintive sounds, so will a fixed complex gradually stereotype the whole mode of speech of the individual, so that we can finally know that day after day we will receive with mathematical accuracy the same answer to a certain question.
In these processes we find some of the normal prototypes for the stereotypy of dementia præcox.[2] When we examine the
- ↑ Janet, l. c., p. 335 ff., p. 349, says: "This more or less complete stoppage of certain actions is one of the most essential phenomena in the mental states of the obsessed" (p. 105). "These forced operations are not normal. They are the operations of thought, of action, and of emotion, which are at once excessive, sterile, and of inferior kind."
- ↑ Pfister (Über Verbigeration. Vortrag auf der Versammlung des Deutsch. Ver. f. Psychiatrie in München, 1906. Ref. Neurol.-Psychiatr. Wochenschr., No. 7, 1906) asks whether the stereotypies or the verbigerations have psychological motives or not. He however leaves the question open. Pfister seems to be of the same opinion as we; that each stereotypy has an ideational content as its basis, which, however, on account of its morbidly disturbed manner of expression manifests itself in a distorted manner. ("It is conceivable that ideation stereotypies have an impulse to express themselves, but in their places there is a reproduction
traction leaves an association-vacuum. This similarity occurs in the distraction experiments where, on account of a vacuum of association, one despairingly resorts to antecedent associations. If, however, as in the cases of Heilbronner, somewhat more difficult questions are given, it may result in an emotion and serves the same purpose as a complex. The association-vacuum is primary, inasmuch as there exist no fluent associations to the stimulus ideas in question. In the normal it is the complex which mostly perseveres.
