Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/20

 12 S. FEUENCZI

One can confidently assume that of a scries of tics or stereo- typies, the secondary if not the chief function is to direct attention and feeling from time to time towards particular parts of the body, as for instance the afore-mentioned stroking of the waist, pulling at or settling the clothing, stretching the neck, extending the breasts (in women), licking and biting the lips and also to some extent grimacing and distorting the face, sucking the teeth, etc. These may be cases in which tic is the outcome of con- stitutional narcissism, when the inevitable, common outer stimulus calls up the motor symptom. In contradistinction to this there exist cases which one could call patlioneurotic tics, arising from an organ pathologically and traumatically altered by an abnormal libido charge. Our authorities furnish several good examples:

"A girl presses her head onto her shoulder to allay the pain from an abscess in a tooth, an action called forth by a genuine cause, a wholly intentional muscular reaction that has undoubtedly been actuated through the activity of the cerebral cortex. The patient desires to allay the pain by pressing and warming her cheek. The abscess continues, the gesture is repeated with diminishing intention, then more from habit and at last automatically. Still there is reason and purpose in the act, up to the present nothing abnormal has occurred. Now, however, the abscess is healed and the pain ceases but the girl continues to rest her head on her shoulder every few moments. What is now the reason for the movement? What is the purpose? Both have disappeared. What is then this systematic process originally intentional and coordinated and now repeated automatically without reason or purpose? It is Tic."¹ Naturally some part of the authors' explanation remains to be criticised. As they know nothing of the unconscious mind, they hold that tics, in opposition to a conscious act of will, arise without any participation of the mind and as they are unaware of the possibility of a fixation of memory by a trauma and the tendency to reproduction from the unconscious they hold the actions of a Tiqueur to be senseless and without purpose.

Obviously, to a psycho-analyst the analogy of the origin of tic and the origin of a hysterical conversion-symptom in the acceptation of Breuer and Freud is at once apparent. Common to both is the possibility of retrogression to a perhaps already forgotten trauma, the affect of which was incompletely abreacted at the ¹ Idem.y Op. cit., p. 55. See also the designation of tic : "memory-spasms".