Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/19

 PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL OBSERVATIONS ON TIC 11

capacity for motor and psychic self-control. This view gives an explanation of the fact that in Tic the apparently heterogeneous symptoms of motor twitching and Coprolalia come to be fused in the same illness. Further character traits of tic patients, easily understood from this standpoint, and described by the authors, are: the ease with which they are excited or tired, Aprosexia, rambling and flight of ideas, the tendency to inordinate desire (Alcoholism), incapacity to endure physical pain or strain. All these traits can be explained in accordance with our views without being arbitrary if in the case of tic patients we think of the tendency to ab react as being heightened and the capacity for psychic retention lowered as the result of enhanced or fixated narcissism, corresponding to Breuer's bi-partition of psychical functioning activities into Abreaction and Retention. Abreaction is a more archaic method of relieving accrued stimulation, it approximates more closely to the physiological reflex than does the still primitive method of control e. g. repression. It is characteristic of animals and children. It is not by chance that the authors state, simply from communications from their patients and from their own conclusions, without any idea of the deeper meaning, that tic patients are often "like children", that they feel themselves young, are unable to govern their emotions, that traits of character seen frequently "in badly brought up children and eradicated in normal persons of adult age by reason and reflection, persist in tic patients in spite of increasing years and that to such a degree that in many characteristics they appear to be nothing but big children."¹

Their "need of contradiction and opposition" is worthy of special notice, not only on account of the psychical analogy to motor defence reactions in tic patients but because it is also calculated to throw light upon much of the negativism in Schizo- phrenia. We know through Psycho-Analysis that in Paraphrenia the patient withdraws his libido from the outside world to concentrate it on himself; every outside stimulus, whether it be physiological or psychical, disturbs his new state, he is therefore prepared to withdraw himself from such stimuli by active flight or to ward them off by motor reaction or negativism. But we will subject this question of motor expression to a more penetrating enquiry.

¹ Idem., Op. cit., p. I5.