Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/57

Rh Tiling, at any rate, even further than Neisser thought he could go. At the question of etiology, that is, at the nucleus of the problem, one must halt. The individual psychology of neither Freud nor Tiling explains the origin of the existing psychosis. In the citation from Freud's analysis we very clearly see that the "hysterical" mechanisms uncovered by him suffice to explain the origin of hysteria, why then does a dementia præcox originate? We can readily understand why the content of the delusions and hallucinations are of such a nature and of no other; but why non-hysterical delusions and hallucinations should at all appear we do not know. Here at the basis of all there should be one physical cause embracing all the psychological ones. Let us assume with Freud that every paranoid form of dementia præcox runs according to the mechanism of hysteria, but why is the paranoid unusually stable and resistive, while hysteria is characterized by the great mobility of its symptoms? Here we strike against a new phase of the disease. As Neisser puts it, the mobility of the hysterical symptoms is based on the mobility of the affects, while the paranoid state is characterized by the fixation of the affects. This thought extraordinarily important for dementia præcox is formulated by Neisser as follows:

"From without only a very poor assimilation takes place. The patient is able to exert less and less voluntary influence on the stream of his ideas and in this manner there originate separate groups of idea complexes of much greater volume than in the normal. These complexes are, as to contents, connected by certain inherent personal relations, but hardly coalesce in any other way, so that depending on the momentary constellations it is now this and now that one which more intensively determines the direction of the continued psychic elaboration and association, In this way there results a disintegration of the personality which becomes so to say a passive spectator of the inflowing impressions from the various irritative sources and an inanimate puppet for the freed irritations thus generated. The affects normally