358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Or, take a case of developing melancholia, where again the physical 

 and the mental seem to vie with each other in the slide downward into 

 abject misery. Here the defective metabolism, the choked secretory 

 and excretory functions, the muscular weakness, and all the rest, are 

 sufficient in a way to explain the mental condition as represented by its- 

 own peculiar slowness, weakness and distress. But however much and 

 clearly these may " explain " to the observer, they most certainly do not 

 constitute the pain which is really suffered — the morbid self-conscious- 

 ness, the overwhelming depression, the fear of self-destruction, the 

 dissociation from the rest of humanity — in fact, the poignant psy- 

 chalgia, for which only personal experience can afford correct knowl- 

 edge or provide the data for anything like a correct description. To all 

 such, psychalgia is a definite, horrid fact, not to be mistaken for any 

 other fact in the universe. 



Take again the perplexing development and especially the slow 

 systematization of the inner experiences of the youthful hebephrenic, or 

 paranoid. Beginning with scarcely recognized perversions of one or 

 more sense functionings, or with weakening or perversion of the more 

 elaborate perceptional or ideational activities, the victim duly comes to 

 the point where everything persistently clusters about his inner self, 

 progressively to lead on to perplexity or danger or failure, with all the 

 poignant mental distress that naturally belongs therewith ; so great dis- 

 tress in fact, that long before such a state of self-monopolizing is reached, 

 there is a period during which mental pain is so predominant that often 

 some sort of real physical pain may be welcomed as chiefly beneficent. 

 Surely, no one can suppose that the weakness, the muddlings, the sus- 

 picions, the fears, the antipathies and antagonisms, the imperative 

 insistences and explosions of such an one, can be confounded with any 

 sort of physical pain whatever. Here, as before, psychalgia is felt to 

 be a fact, distinctive, dominating and determinative. 



This leads logically to the consideration of the by far largest group 

 of psychalgias, those derived from the so-called " border-land " cases on 

 the one hand, and from the great number of persons who in no ordi- 

 nary sense are " cases " at all, on the other. 



Abnormal psychology has yet an imperative need to be studied as 

 never before, and this notwithstanding the far-reaching revelations and 

 suggestions of more recent investigators. In this undertaking, intro- 

 spective psychology, prosecuted by the right kind of self-observers, can 

 become of such profound use, that almost everything as yet discovered 

 may turn out to have been introductory, to say the most. Probably, 

 there is no one who has been trained to properly look in upon himself, 

 who does not have more or less frequent attacks of psychalgia so clearly 

 defined, that were they accurately observed and recorded, a key would 

 be furnished whereby not only the problem of his own morbidity could 



