PROBLEMS OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 755 



better than can the introspective study of the psychologist. In the 

 department of medicine it has furnished an intelligible explanation 

 of many previously incomprehensible derangements of the mind 

 and body. With this increase in precision of our knowledge of 

 mental processes it has ceased to be sufficient for the physician 

 to know that an anesthesia or paralysis or other disturbed function 

 of the body is due to some mysterious mental influence, but medical 

 culture requires that he should know the exact mechanism of this 

 influence. The researches of recent years have furnished this know- 

 ledge in many important particulars. 



Dissociation and Automatism 



Abnormal psychological phenomena, as phenomena, may be 

 divided into two great groups, according as they are manifestations 

 of (A) dissociations or weakened syntheses of conscious states, or 

 (B) of automatisms. 



In the first group (A), the dissociations and imperfect syntheses, 

 may be placed the losses of memory (amnesias), the losses of per- 

 ceptions (anesthesias) , the losses of motor functions (paralyses) , the 

 alterations of character, the division of personality, etc. 



The second group (B), the automatisms, would include all those 

 phenomena which are the expressions of an activity beyond the 

 will and control of the personal consciousness and involve abnormal 

 syntheses. It would include the fixed ideas, the hallucinations, the 

 deliriums, the obsessions, impulsions, tics, contractures, convulsive 

 seizures, and various perversions of the visceral processes. The 

 automatisms may be still further classified according as they are 

 syntheses of dissociated (so-called subconscious) elements, so char- 

 acteristic of hysteria, or syntheses of the personal consciousness 

 characteristic of psychasthenic states. Both may exist together. 



These two classes of phenomena (A and B) bear a reciprocal re- 

 lation to one another, in that pari passu with the development of 

 a weakening of the power of synthesis, or of a complete dissociation, 

 the remaining restricted elements of the personal consciousness, 

 or the dissociated elements, respectively tend to take on auto- 

 matic activity; as an example, take the obsessions of psychasthenia 

 confined entirely to the personal consciousness, and the hysterical 

 attack due to the automatic activity of dissociated (subconscious) 

 memories of past experiences. And vice versa, the development of 

 automatism with its abnormal syntheses tends to indnce dissocia- 

 tion, as when an artificially induced idea robs the personal con- 

 sciousness of its sensory perceptions (anesthesia) or produces retro- 

 grade amnesia. Thus in any particular syndrome, such as the hyster- 

 ical state, or the psychasthenic obsessions, we have combined the 



