Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/26

2 significance: (1) The course of ideation is retarded. (2) The attention of the patient is frequently so fixed by pictures shown him that he can only with difficulty rid himself of them.

The frequent obstructions (the retardations of reaction time) are explained by Sommer by the visual fixation. The condition of absent-mindedness among normal persons occasionally shows similar phenomena; e. g., amazement and "staring into vacancy." Because of this analogy of the catatonic condition to normal absent-mindedness Sommer affirms something similar to Tschisch and Freusberg, namely, that there is a diminution of attention. Catalepsy according to Sommer is another phenomenon closely related to optical fixation and which he considers "in all cases as a phenomenon of thoroughly psychic origin." With this conception Sommer places himself in sharp contrast to the view of Roller, to which also Clemens Neisser unconditionally adheres.

Says Roller: "The presentations and sensations which among the insane chiefly come to perception, forcing themselves into the field of consciousness, are those which have been caused by the morbid states of the subordinate centers, and when active apperception, the attention, enters into activity it becomes fixed and held by the morbid perceptions," etc.

By way of addition Neisser observes: "Wherever we look in insanity we always meet with something strange which cannot be explained according to the analogy of normal psychical activity. The logical mechanisms in insanity are put in motion not through the apperceptive or associative conscious psychic activity, but by pathological irritations lying under the threshold of consciousness." Neisser therefore agrees with the concepts of Roller. This view does not seem to me to be without its objections. Firstly, it is based upon an anatomical conception of the psychic processes, a view against which too much warning cannot be given. What part the "subordinate centers" play in the origin