Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/41

Rh divisions of the psychic functions into noö- and thymopsychic agree with reality. But it is a question whether a trite content of consciousness manifested in the patient with an enormous affect seems incongruous only to us who can only most sparingly look into his soul, or is it the same for the subjective sensation of the patient. I shall make myself clear by the following example:

I visit a gentleman in his office. Suddenly he starts up enraged and swears most excitedly at a clerk who placed a newspaper on the right instead of the left side of the table. I am astonished and make a mental note about the peculiar nervousness of this person. But after a while I learn from the other employees that the clerk has done the same thing wrongly dozens of times and hence the anger of the man was quite adequate.

Had I not received subsequent explanations I should have formed a wrong picture of the psychology of this person. We are frequently confronted with a similar condition in dementia præcox. Owing to the peculiar seclusiveness of the patients we see into them but little, a fact which every psychiatrist will substantiate. It is therefore readily understood that many excitements appear to us inexplicable because we do not see their associate causes. That may even happen to us. We are occasionally for a time in bad humor, and quite inadequately so without being conscious of its cause. The simplest responses are then uttered in a disproportionate, emphatic, and irritable tone, tc. If even a normal individual is not always clear about the causes of his ill-humor, how little can we know when confronted with the mind of a precocious dement? On account of the evident inadequacy of our psychological diagnosis, we must be very careful about the supposition of a real incoördination in the sense of Stransky. Although judging from clinical appearances there are frequent incongruities, they are by no means exclusively limited to dementia præcox. In hysteria, likewise, the incongruity is an every-day occurrence. One can see it in the very trite fact of the so-called hysterical "exaggerations," whose counterpart is the well known "belle indifférence" of hysterics. We also find violent excitements over nothing, at times over something which in no way shows any recognizable connection with the excitement. Yet psycho-analysis uncovers the motives, and we then