Psychological Automatism

A passage from our study on the character of hysterics The term "hysteria" was a common 19th-century psychiatric diagnosis, often applied to women, used to describe a wide array of sensory, motor, and emotional symptoms believed to originate in the mind. undoubtedly lacked precision, as it has not been well understood. We wrote that lying is not, as was long believed, a natural and permanent stigma of hysteria. On one hand, many individuals are extremely dishonest and lie without being hysterical; on the other hand, a great number of hysterics may present all the symptoms of the illness to the highest degree and yet remain very honest. But one must not conclude from this that we deny the existence of lying among hysterics; we believe, on the contrary, that it is very frequent, but as an "accident" In 19th-century medicine, an "accident" refers to a secondary symptom or a temporary complication rather than an essential characteristic of the disease.—a very particular form of delirium. We have indicated elsewhere several origins of this lying; the most frequent is the fixed idea idée fixe: a persistent, obsessive thought that dominates the mind which completely absorbs the patient's spirit and renders them incapable of understanding any other thought. The hysteric sacrifices everything to their idea of the present moment because, in reality, they forget everything else; they thus become capable of both lies and criminal actions. If one decides to frankly consider these patients as the mentally ill original: "aliénés" — a term used for those legally or medically recognized as insane, one will be less surprised by these disorders of conduct, which are not essential to the illness but constitute very frequent complications.

In this work, we have made only rapid allusions to other mental illnesses. Our study on spiritism The belief that the living can communicate with the spirits of the dead, which the author analyzes here as a psychological phenomenon. has been supplemented by a recent article "on contemporary spiritism." We have briefly shown how the phenomena of obsession and impulse were linked to mental disintegration désagrégation mentale: a psychological theory where the personality or consciousness "breaks apart" into independent fragments; this is a work we hope to resume later.

These descriptions of various mental illnesses have remained purely symptomatic and clinical. We have noted that the disintegration of the mind can have the same clinical characteristics while depending on different causes: heredity, intoxications, auto-infections, etc., may produce this syndrome. It seems to us that it was not useless to analyze and understand it before seeking to trace it back to its causes. Our work sought to penetrate neither into the nature of the spirit nor into the primary cause of diseases. We hope that the few observations it contains will not have been useless for the development of pathological psychology.