Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/109

Rh feeling of activity is the "sentiment de perception incomplète." A patient says: "It is as though I see things through a veil, a mist, or through a wall which separates me from reality." A normal person who is under the immediate influence of a great affect might express himself in a similar manner. But precocious dements express themselves in a like manner when they speak about their indefinite perception of the environment ("It seems to me as if you are the doctor," "they say it was my mother," "it looks like Burghölzli, but it is not"). The expression of Janet's patient, "The world appears to me like a gigantic hallucination," is true in the fullest sense also of precocious dements who always (especially in the acute stages) live, so to say, as in a dream, and they express themselves in a corresponding manner both during the disease and catamnestically.

The "sentiments d'incomplétude" are also especially related to the affects. A patient of Janet said: "It seems to me that I will not see my children again; everything leaves me indifferent and cold and I wish I could despair, cry out from pain; I know that I ought to be unhappy, but I do not arrive at that state; I have no more pleasure than pain; I know that a repast is good but I swallow it because it is necessary without finding in it the pleasure that I would have found before. There is an enormous thickness preventing me from feeling the moral impressions." Another patient says: "I would like to try to think of my little girl but I can not, the thought of my child barely passes through my mind and does not leave me any feeling."

I have repeatedly heard similar spontaneous utterances from hysterics as well as from precocious dements who were still able to give more or less information. A young catatonic woman who was forced to part from her husband and child under especially tragic circumstances, showed a total lack of emotion for all familiar reminiscences. I placed before her the whole very sad situation, and attempted to evoke an adequate feeling. While I spoke she laughed, when I finished she became calm for a moment and said, "I simply can not feel any more."

According to our conception, the "sentiments d'incomplétude," etc., are products of inhibition which emanate from an