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The Relation of Emotional and Intellectual Functions in Paranoia and in Obsessions (1906)

Adolf Meyer

Any unsophisticated student and observer who has followed the literature on paranoia during the last ten years, has had some reason to wonder why such emphasis was put on the question whether paranoia was fundamentally an intellectual or an emotional disorder. I never could see much use in the discussion except insofar as it illustrated the doubtful definition of the distinction of emotion and intellectual function as soon as one left the most striking examples of the one type and the other and got into a zone of mixed and doubtful conditions. It is easy to see that it is wise and inevitable to emphasize the emotional nature of a fright and the merely intellectual nature of my present use of the word fright, or the intellectual nature of the sensation of a red line and the emotional feature of the reaction to a flash of lightning. But in many mental happenings the two belong together in a way that makes a ripping apart, or even emphasis of the one or the other, unprofitable and dogmatic. A study of paranoia by Bleuler, with a reply by Berze, and a review on obsessions by Bumke, furnish material for a ventilation of the possible reasons for the perennial dispute and for an admission of heresy.

Broadly speaking, almost every mental activity allows us to recognize relations to two fundamental systems, that of the shaping of the personal physio-psychological ('emotional') attitudes of our circulatory, respiratory and vegetative side, and that of the more fleeting and more impersonal neuro-muscular ('intellectual') relations, based on the sense organs per se and the muscular apparatus carrying and directing them. Or, to speak in other terms, almost every mental activity implies an adjustment of the emotional attitude (that balance which is attended to largely by the sympathetic nervous mechanisms and their central connections), and an adjustment within the intellectual system (the apparatus of sensations and ideational relations). The moving entities or 'idées-forces' are, however, compounds, which we must have the courage to use as units for what they are worth without allowing ourselves to be distracted by endless quibbling over the nature of components and their real functional relations. We must learn to work again with complexes and provisional biological entities instead of assuming merely arithmetical relations between postulated fragments of the situations. There are some important relations about which we cannot afford to have finally settled ideas, and among these stands foremost the relation of the emotional and the intellectual aspects of mental activities. By dealing modestly with situations as they present themselves and for what they are worth, we can use them in our work and draw just as valid inferences and we may hope to keep nearer the fundamental science, biology, and its utilization.

We frequently hear of patients awakening with a feeling of indefinite anxiety or sadness or nervousness which we cannot class otherwise than as emotional states, while at other times these same patients attach their emotional attitudes to special events, or to anticipations of definite events: the thought of the death of a friend, or the thought of ill-will or persecution from another person, or the memory of a perfectly irrelevant fact of absolutely insufficient bearing, as in the case of a woman who fretted over having disgraced herself and her family by exposing a slightly soiled petticoat in getting into a buggy, or some other plainly incidental food for her fundamental uneasiness and agitated despair. Or we hear a patient complain of the annoyance of hearing an imaginary orchestra play and occupy his attention, so as to drive him to distraction. Here the fundamental fact is his uncontrollable musical imagination with the vividness and independence of a hypnagogic hallucination, and the distress is largely present owing to collision of the musical drift with the ordinary and more important and pressing interests of the person. But there are many instances where the predominance of the emotional trend or of the intellectual side is far less conspicuous and more variable and the whole event none the less plainly a vital factor in the determination of the patient's conduct and trend of mentation. In practice we weigh the emotional factor and the purely intellectual one of such constellations as jealousy, or anxiety, or uneasiness, without, however, assuming that there would be any advantage in pushing the analysis so far as to have one mass of pure emotion and one mass of pure intellectual processes.

Emotional and intellectual determinants are frequently worth weighing independently for their different bearing as well as for the fact that different parts of our organism are involved. Yet empirically we deal with the situation as with a compound which loses its essential traits by decomposition, and we must be ready to deal with such compounds for what they are worth and likely to mean in the stream of events without distracting ourselves over temporarily irrelevant questions. When we have to study the physical relations and properties of certain substances and bodies, to load ourselves down with chemical discriminations would be a useless accumulation of ballast. In empirical psychology we stand as it were on grounds of the more relational science of physics. Even within their proper domain of analytical psychology we have good reasons to doubt that an analytic knowledge of elements can have any such claim to justification by results as the elements in chemistry deserve. The psychic 'elements' are the most detailed and refined products of differentiation and so numerous that work with these 'elements' is quite a different proposition. It is quite possible that the psychological elements had better be dropped as essentials of a dynamic psychology, and that the maintenance of the sharp division of sensation, idea, emotion and will is not worth the effort, except in their proper place and sphere, especially when we inquire into the specific participation of definite sense-organs and nervous mechanisms for our neurological diagnoses. A paranoia would no doubt be the same process in a blind deaf-mute and in a person with lesion of both pyramidal tracts. Its interest lies much less in the elements ' sensation' and ' volition' than in the existence of peculiar complexes and arrangements of 'idées-forces.'

Since the days of Westphal distinctions have been canonized between disorders primarily of the emotional field of mental activity, and disorders primarily of the intellectual field. In the somewhat bewildering domain of psychology a clean-cut and apparently simple contrast is a veritable godsend, and once established in a mind it becomes a path of least resistance just as some contrasts enslave the mind of the struggling tyro in composition who falls back on the 'internal' and the 'external' reasons of things and similar trite formulas of roads to thought. The formula lingers apparently as a stimulus to thought. In reality it leads to usually gratuitous discussions, and stands in the way of broader perspectives, until independent instincts crowd out the obstacle. There is no doubt but that the contrast of emotional and intellectual features of mental activities has a certain practical foundation. But the dogmatic division of emotion and intellect leads to unintelligible conflicts. An excellent illustration of this calamity in psychopathology is given by Ziehen who, after opposing psychoses 'without intellectual defect' to those 'with defect,' contrasts among the simple psychoses the affective psychoses (mania and melancholia) with the intellectual psychoses (stupidity, paranoia, dreamy states, symptomatic deliria, and obsessions and impulsions and psychopathic constitutions).

The unsophisticated reader will, no doubt, suspect behind it all some reason, in Ziehen's system of psychology. We might understand the tendency to oppose the more localizable side of mental facts (the sensations with their physical stimuli and accepted cortical substrata) to the non-localizable general emotional reactions, or something like this. As a matter of fact the above division is largely empirical. Ziehen, admits "but two psychological elements, sensation and concept. The only process which works with both is the association of ideas. Its product is action." There are no special' mental powers,' no need of a special ' will,' nor a special apperceptive power, nor special emotional powers. Emotions are never isolated, but always attached to sensations and concepts, as parts of the same. Yet few alienists perpetuate Westphal's distinction of primary and secondary emotions more than Ziehen. This inconsistency in recognizing primary emotional disturbances does not seem to even disturb such a forbidding intellectualistic system as that of Ziehen.

The whole embarrassment comes from the lingering dogmas concerning the relation of intellectual and emotional data and is a veritable spook which haunts the thoughts and writings of some of the most productive and independent writers, and it will do so until it is thoroughly exposed to daylight. It is a question of the doctor taking his own medicine, if we recommend the modern psycho-analytic method as a therapeutic measure in this difficulty. Some clearness on this issue is one of the first steps towards making dynamic conceptions possible in psychopathology.

A review of this issue is by no means merely a work of destruction of idols and criticism. We are in a period of reconstruction, or rather of construction, and the psycho-pathologists' problem in this field may possibly be of some interest in connection with the discussion on the topic of 'feeling' brought out at the last meeting of the American Psychological Association. We deal with a very concrete field, and any way of establishing closer contact with events as they present themselves in life and the theoretical considerations is bound to bring the reader into touch with actual experiences, and to relax temporarily the systematic interests which become so prominent if the discussion is largely one of nomenclature.

I have chosen two representatives as text of this analysis, — Bleuler's attractive and stimulating pamphlet on Affectivity, Suggestibility and Paranoia, as the constructive element, and Bumke's 'Was sind Zwangsvorgange?' in many ways an excellent review, as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of dogmatic purism.

The topics of Bleuler's study seem, at first sight, rather heterogeneous. He treats first of affectivity, next of suggestion, and finally applies his results to the psychology of paranoia. I render here his own resume^ as probably the fairest way of doing justice to his ideas; but in some places I shall introduce brief references to the material of the full paper, so as to make the reader somewhat familiar with the evidence on which he builds. Bleuler first attempts to define affectivity. " Affectivity is to be sharply distinguished from those feelings which really are intellectual processes." Nahlowsky's intellectual feelings are thus disposed of as intellectual processes, e. g., the vague and hazy impressions and suppositions; Janet's feeling of strangeness, of novelty, of familiarity, of incompleteness, etc., and Lipps's feeling of certainty, of truth or of probability, or the patient's feeling of suspicions (which is not a feeling of one's being suspicious, but an impression that somebody's acts or attitude are threatening evil) ; furthermore the feeling of sadness, if by that we mean the realization of one's being sad.

"Whether I feel my bowels or not, whether I have a feeling of certainty, of suspicion, is quite irrelevant for my psyche as long as no affect is added. As soon as an affect appears, it governs at once the entire psyche." This explains, I think, how Bleuler comes to say that somatic as well as other sensations, intracentral processes such as the feeling of certainty or probability, or the feeling of being sad or blind, or hazy suppositions and other 'intellectual feelings,' are 'toto coelo' different from the feelings of pleasure and pain, and from true affectivity. " Hunger, thirst, pain, etc., are mixtures of intellectual and affective processes, and contain a sensation and a feeling determined by it. Other somatic sensations, such as the feeling of tension of our muscles, have additional relations to affectivity inasmuch as they form an integral part of the symptomatology of affects.

"Only the affectivity in the narrower sense has the well-known effects on the functions of the body (tears, heart, respiration), as well as on the inhibition and facilitation of thoughts, in the normal and abnormal condition. It is the pushing element in our actions. Through it the reaction to an isolated sensory impression is spread over the entire body and the entire mind, opposing tendencies are eliminated, and the reaction thus receives its extent and force. It determines a coordinated activity of all our nervous and psychic organs. It also reinforces the reaction from the point of view of time, by giving to a definite direction of activity a duration lasting beyond the primary impetus. It is, broadly speaking, the element which supplies the impetus to our activities. It is the cause of a great many dissociations and transformations of our ego, of certain forms of deliria, etc.

"Affectivity shows a certain independence as compared with the intellectual processes, inasmuch as affects can be transferred from one process to another, and inasmuch as different persons react so differently to the same intellectual processes that it is impossible to put forth rules of affectivity. Moreover, in the child the development of affectivity is quite independent from that of the intellect.

"There evidently are different types with regard to their manner of reaction to strongly affective processes. Unfortunately, they have not yet been studied. It is, however, quite possible that it depends on such differences in the mode of reaction whether an individual will become hysterical or paranoic, or develop another one of the disorders which we provisionally call functional.

"Attention presents itself as an aspect of affectivity [as a special type of effects of affectivity]. It directs the associations in exactly the same sense as the feelings, and it does not occur without affects. In pathological states it changes in exactly the same sense as the feelings.

"In a child Bleuler gives a number of excellent observations on his own and other children of very complex responses in which he claims a far-reaching independence of the affective development] the feelings (and affects) can so thoroughly take the place of reasoning that the result of the affective facilitation and obstruction equals that of complicated logic. These are the so-called instinctive reactions.

"In pathology the abnormalities of affectivity govern entire disease pictures. In organic psychoses affectivity is by no means obliterated, as is often claimed; on the contrary', it reacts more readily than in the normal. The obliteration is apparently secondary and due to the reduction of intelligence. As soon as a complex concept can no longer be formed or grasped entirely, we naturally cannot expect an affective reaction corresponding to it.

"This holds similarly for alcoholics, whereas in epileptics the affectivity is preserved but shows a marked perseveration instead of the unstable equilibrium in the organic diseases.

"In idiocy we find all kinds of types of affectivity as in the normal, only within even wider limits. In dementia praecox the affects are suppressed in a definite manner; but their effects are still demonstrable."

Throughout this description we miss many standard problems which we find usually discussed under the caption emotions (Bleuler briefly discusses them at the end of the chapter), and find, instead, matters which are usually looked upon as a feature of all activities^ but claimed here as the prototype of affectivity. 'Affectivity is that broader concept of which will and conation are but one aspect' (p. 17), and this is further illustrated by the quotation: 'Man preaches what he thinks, he does what he feels.' The drift of affective life is adjusted by as yet poorly studied mechanisms, and, especially in the intelligent and cultivated, by impressions from the past and still more plainly from the future; worry and hope determine a great share of one's present activity. From the pathological side Bleuler gives good illustrations of this in the form of 'wish dreams,' of 'wish-delirium,'of 'wish hysteria,' of convenient and wished-for illness. These lead over to suggestion and autosuggestion, and to the peculiar 'displacements' and 'conversions' in the sense of Freud, used for the suppression of the unpleasant, and of great importance in the explanation of hysteria, obsessions and dementia praecox. Bleuler admits here his full acceptance of the nomenclature and general attitude in psycho-pathology of Freud, and emphasizes the peculiar ways in which affectivity achieves the autosuggestion, and a number of other 'mechanisms' (p. 21).

In his discussion of the relative independence of affectivity, Bleuler furnishes rich material offsetting the unconvincing dogmatic presentation of those who speak of 'feeling-tone' merely, and leave the factors of the drift of association not further analyzed or accounted for. In this he seems to me to be in line with a tendency inevitable with those who wish psychology to be a study of the determining factors of the stream of mental life, and not merely an analysis of abstract and forceless epithets and epiphenomena. It is a movement intimated in many places and already clearly provided with the designation 'dynamic psychology' in Thorndike's Elements of Psychology. Bleuler's plea for that which we would call the dynamic role of 'affectivity' is a wholesome call for a recasting of values and an emancipation from the set conceptions which have so far repressed the dynamic viewpoint.

Bleuler himself considers the dynamic conception premature (p. 32). He disputes Fechner's claim of having measured the strength of psychic processes; 'affectivity alone and its manifestations appear to us as intensive or quantitative magnitudes; we size up its strength, but cannot measure it as yet, and have no knowledge of what determines it. 'Yet he adds: "We therefore have no possibility as yet to found dynamic theories and even little cause to search for them. It is, however, true that a better knowledge of the physiological basis of our psychic life will some day bring the dynamic factor into the discussion." These efforts, Bleuler justly remarks, will, however, have little in common with the pseudo-dynamics of the questionable theories which claim that sensation is 'the same thing as idea, 'but' of greater intensity,' and therefore hallucinations of more powerful influence than ideas. Bleuler mentions this claim as an illustration of the precocity of dynamic conceptions. It would seem better to say that these dynamic differentiations are largely speculative and that true dynamic psychology will have to start with the 'force' of actual events, without much concern for the traditional definitions of sensation, ideas, feelings, etc., but with due respect for what would appear as moving factors. Mere comparisons of the ' strength ' of sensations, idea and hallucinations are based on considerations of abstract entities and appear altogether speculative and not the proper material for investigation to start on.

Whether Bleuler has made it altogether clear what affectivity is, in his sense, is not certain, and it may be just as well that we have no final formula for it. The abstract does not render his numerous wholesome and homely materials for inferences which well deserve to be read in the original. They suggest a struggle for emancipation. This is certain, that Bleuler consciously or unconsciously encourages an emancipated study of a number of mental reactions slighted by intellectualism : but he maintains his very emphatic differentiation of intellectual feelings and affectivity, while the general broad meaning of his use of 'affectivity' suggests even an emancipation of the concept from the pleasure and pain paradigms. The feelings of pleasure and pain, to which we must add the affects, the affectivity, 'makes his attitude less plain than when he says, in his interesting discussion of association (p. 29-32): 'Attention is therefore nothing but a special instance of results of affect.' Or still better, when he contrasts intellectual and affective processes in their ontogenesis (p. 33): Intelligence, as a mere form of combining memory images, is, no doubt, developed at birth; the child merely lacks the contents of experience. Affectivity also exists; it, however, demands no content, no material from the outside; experience furnishes merely the occasion to the production of the affect. "It, therefore, can express itself from the very start in all its complications and finesse (naturally with the exception of the sexual sphere, although perhaps even there to some extent, as Freud shows)."

It is easy to see that his interesting samples of largely 'affective' reactions in children are a striking mixture of experience and readiness for distinct responses. If he emphasizes the affective nature of these responses, he approaches them to the instinctive reactions, and thereby comes near to identify 'affectivity' with the main-spring of all responsiveness and activity which is not purely mechanical or reflex.'

That Bleuler takes up the discussion of suggestion, is natural and might also be called a corroboration of the imputation of a dynamic tendency. He sees in it ' an affective process '; suggestibility is a part phenomenon of affectivity; the intellectual feelings, faith, etc., can only produce physical changes and hallucinations and disruption of logic through the intermediary of an affect; suggestion can directly govern the activity of glands, of the heart, of vasomotors, of the intestine, split off certain complexes of ideas from their antagonists, preclude criticism and dictate illusions and even positive and negative hallucinations to the senses. This is more than the effect of credulity of Bernheim; the affect accompanying the suggestion and roused by it is the spring of action. " Suggestibility is for a community what the affect is for the individual. It assures unity and consistence of activity and a ' collective' affect. Like the affect in children, suggestibility is active before intelligence. The greater the affective value of an idea, the more infective or communicable it is." Not all imitation (such as the unpremeditated imitation of the movement of another) is worth being called the product of suggestion. Hypnotic suggestion presupposes a state of fascination, ' the affective significance of which, it is true, is not clear yet.' To this Bleuler adds in a foot-note: * Vogt ignores this affect when he demands that hypnotic suggestion must be free of affect.' The effect of autosuggestion can justly be described as effect of affectivity. The relation to attention and to pain-sensation is identical ; but our knowledge of suggestibility and affectivity is not sufficiently definite as yet to connect the greater or less suggestibility with the presence or absence of a definite fund of affectivity. For many reasons a community is more suggestible than an individual. Suggestion never occurs pure and wholly uninfluenced by other psychic mechanisms; it is an aspect of affectivity.

The whole chapter is full of interesting discussions of detail. Themain lines quoted make plain that the focus of interest lies with the dynamic principle of the process, and in the demonstration of unity with the dynamic principle of mental life generally. This at least is the line of stimulation along which the reviewer gets the greatest satisfaction from the very interesting but not otherwise clearly pointed chapter.

Bleuler then passes rather abruptly to the discussion of paranoia. He revives and extends a criticism he gave of Specht, who made the 'affect of mistrust or suspicion' the foundation of paranoia (which is defined as the isolated gradual development of an ' unshakable delusion- system with perfect retention of clearness and order of thought, volition and action'). Specht, with whom Bleuler sympathizes on many points, is criticised for attempting an assailable generalization when he claimed that the ' affect of mistrust' is a mixture of pleasure and pain feelings; that 'therefore' it occurs during the transition of mania or melancholia into its opposite or into recovery, and that it makes of paranoia the 'third functional psychosis besides mania and melancholia.'

Bleuler maintains that 'mistrust is not an affect' (Specht wisely speaks of the affect of mistrust and would thus make much of Bleuler's analysis of mistrust as such unnecessary), that it is not a mixture of pleasure and pain (which claim of Specht's is hardly to be taxed as more than one along the lines of least resistance, the rut of an excessively simplified psychology of emotion), and that paranoia can in no way be classed with the affective psychoses, but is something wholly different. "A general and primary disorder of affect is in no way demonstrated as yet in paranoia." The affective disorders which do occur with it are 'secondary' consequences of delusions. Paranoia is equally devoid of a general disorder of perception or apperception (Berze), or a general alteration of the memory-images (an assumption of Sandberg). Nor is the hypertrophy of the ego (Tiling) demonstrated as a regular symptom of paranoia. The egocentric character in paranoia is merely a consequence of the 'continual prominence of an affectful complex of ideas.' As in the normal, such a complex determines a prevailing attitude. Inasmuch as many matters which have no relation to the patient become erroneously related to the complex, "delusions of reference or of interpretation arise. The ego appears hypertrophic through the affective complexes.

Under the influence of a chronic affect connected with the said complex, errors occur just as in a normal person under similar emotion. The pathological feature consists in the incorrigible nature or fixation of the errors and their progression. What determines this feature is not explained yet. It may be due to an 'anatomical or chemical foundation,' or it may be 'functional' where the affectivity is increased in a certain direction, or is too persistently active, or where the affect is kept alive by some tear or break in the life of the patient. As long as we do not know the underlying process we cannot say whether paranoia really comprehends an essential and unitary disease-entity. Megalomania and persecutory paranoia might be fundamentally different diseases. On the other hand it is possible that certain hallucinatory forms might be identical with the ordinary forms of paranoia."

The 63 pages devoted to paranoia contain a wealth of very fascinating material hardly intimated by this brief summary. Bleuler describes a few cases to illustrate the relation of delusion and affect.

The first case is that of a bright woman whose opportunities were unsettled by the bankruptcy of her father, and who finally after some trying experiences established herself with her mother in a prosperous but taxing pursuit (making a special kind of desserts and sweets). In 1888, at the age of 35, when her best peddler became sick, she began to worry over her prospects, did not seem to see a way out of the calamity, and at the same time she had an idea that certain people would be rather pleased to see her in trouble. The peddler recovered, and the worry and the rudimentary idea of persecution passed away. The following year the rather sudden death of her peddler upset her. She lost her grasp on her possibilities, made a contract to undertake a working branch of a grocery, but gave it up the next day. She was sure of ruin. She became fussy about the work, thought the customers did not really want to buy from her. Notions developed, such as even normal individuals might have under similar circumstances. Shereferred casual utterances to herself. Remarks of the minister and of neighbors, on closer consideration and after a short period of incubation, were misinterpreted. In the kitchen she felt herself observed, perhaps by a mirror (these ideas were later corrected). In 1891, she was upset by a new venture, expressed ideas of suicide, was brought to the hospital, as a melancholia with suicidal inclination — she urged to be discharged;' the hospital had nothing for her to do'; she felt secretly observed; after a while she was occupied with copying, and finally discharged as paranoia, improved.

Later there occurred much worry, usually with self-accusation and a tendency to point to ill-will of others. She thought her relatives suspected that family quarrels were due to her; her opponents plotted to ruin her and asked the ministers to preach against her, how she might have done better. She worked rather uneasily, made a number of attempts at suicide. In the hospital from 1898, she behaved in a perfectly orderly manner, worked, but continued to feel that she gets what she deserved — that Dr. Bleuler would telephone to the minister whenever she went to church, etc., and numerous poorly related ideas of reference. Bleuler claims that the first thing was the occurrence of misconceptions such as might also occur in the healthy under similar affects, and subordination of various experiences to a complex of ideas kept alive by affect and the general trend of ideas. Only the fixation of the error is pathological ; fixation turns it into a delusion, and this and its spreading constitutes the paranoia.

The second case, born 1865, a clerk, had an excess of $20 in his accounts in 1896 (possibly to test his honesty), - and sometime later a deficit of 50 Fr. which was not questioned by the authorities. In 1899 another deficit of 40 Fr. occurred which he tried to cover up by falsifying the accounts. From that time self-reproach of early masturbation and these financial irregularities, ideas of reference, certainty that he would be taken to court, retrospective falsification, such as the claim that the death of a lady friend 18 years previous had been caused by a malicious nurse.

The third case was a capable draughtsman with lofty schemes, but without energy and with too much sensitiveness. Evasion of persecutions, continual discrepancy between desire and execution. Vagrant existence, finally alcoholism, shooting of a prosecutor, claims of inventions, etc.

The fourth case is that of a dullard, who married a Catholic woman with whom he had lived illegitimately. He worried over not having asked his minister, and one day he failed to salute him; and once later he failed to salute his employer; after that he developed the obsession to salute everybody, and the conviction that God had put upon him the duty of salutation, as punishment for his sins (masturbation, the marriage to a Catholic without consultation of the parson and the lack of respect to his employer). Excessive modesty. Not a trace of dementia praecox features. Temporary improvement.

In all these cases a complex of ideas with marked emotional value is said to form the starting point of the delusion and perhaps of the paranoia. While Wernicke considers these ' dominant ideas' a sufficient explanation, Beuler is convinced that most cases show, moreover, a constitutional disposition, and further, frequently, chains of predisposing experiences in the sense of Freud. Even in a normal individual certain situations, such as examination times, produce absolutely abnormal attitudes. A candidate misreads a rather illegible invitation to dinner by his examiner as an announcement of his being plucked! Even in paranoia there is 'no need' of a special affect of suspicion, of an apperception disorder, or other hypothetical factors.

The non-correction of such errors would seem to depend on a disposition, temporary or lasting. Especially a radical break in the career may be a factor. The possibility of a dementia praecox being superadded cannot be denied absolutely. The decline of paranoia is, however, quite different from a dementia. 'Real dementia' is 'invariably' due to factors outside of paranoia. Besides the affective disposition there is also an intellectual disposition, shown in a certain haziness and confusion of ideation. Bleuler further contrasts two cases in which the relations of paranoia and imbecility was in question.

The acknowledgment of fundamental importance of the 'gefiihlsbetonte Komplexe' or affective complexes leads Bleuler to attempt a classification of the types into those of persecution, megalomania (hardly ever physical as in mania or general paralysis, but frequently scientific, religious or political, or with the idea of prominent descent), erotic and jealous tendencies, the question of health in the form of hvpochondriasis (perhaps even as a traumatic neurosis). Bleuler misses but one prominent complex, i. e., that of the desire for progeny, for which I could supply an instance, although as a rule the disorders in the sexual ambitions gradually spread over a wider field than Bleuler wishes to include in his orthodox Kraepelinian definition.

We thus find an emphatic objection, not so much against the emphasis on the emotional weight of the central complex in paranoia, as against a somewhat schematic postulation of ah affect of mistrust, of tense expectation, etc. On this point Bleuler is carried rather far from his own standpoint. Bleuler claims a pure intellectual process when he sees a suspicious individual with a revolver who makes him get ready for an assault, and when he adduces as proof of the absence of affect in the suspicion that he can describe the situation without speaking of an affect, in purely intellectual expressions, and that the amount of affect may vary without a change in the fact of suspicion. In this, he discusses the word suspicion rather than the situation, and then concludes that paranoia cannot be allied to the affect-psychoses, but must be something wholly different.

When I review my observations of paranoia, I find that there are a greater number than Bleuler seems to admit in which the fundamental attitude was for a fairly long time an uneasiness with vague suspicions, and a vague readiness to see in a rather great variety of things material for the suspicions, until gradually the dominant direction asserted itself. In many cases, the lasting delusional complex governs the situation from the start, but only intellectually if we may say so; affectively, there is as a rule the same vague unsettled and uneasy feeling, with a decided deviation of the broad field of affectivity from the normal consistency and harmony of trend and instinct (the functional sum of idees-f orces). There remains the fact that there are cases in which without sufficient cause states of mind arise which are to all intents and purposes the affective attitudes of the paranoic, but without' any definite content, an attitude of vague uneasiness, of a feeling of loss of true adjustment with the environment, that ' meine Ruhe ist hin,' in all its versions, from self-reproach to suspicion, anticipation, etc. What stamps them as paranoic is the inaccessibility to the usual relief of unbalanced states, the fact that they do not produce deep disorders of the stream of thought, apart from the general, perhaps specific, diversion of attention and constructive imagination, i.e., their definition lies in the entire complex situation. In one phase it may be the general affective state, in another a situation better described in terms of a delusional complex (but not the less affective), and under no circumstances can we dispute the weight of a fundamental disruption of the affective apparatus, a disruption of the normal instincts.

May we assume for a moment the possibility of paranoia being a circumscribed affect-psychosis ? In most cases of paranoia we meet with a complex in which it is difficult to determine a purely intellectual defect. The mere 'facts' of the delusions are more or less correct; but the inferences ? Even they appear logical but rouse wrong valuations. But what are valuations if not essentially tied to affectivity, i.e., to the instinctive reaction of certainty or doubt? What determines the idèe-force of doubt if not the presence or absence of a certain uneasiness and hunger for adjustment? Why should we all of a sudden draw the line of affectivity when we approach the intellectual feelings?

The whole discussion has a value if it leads to heuristic results. If Bleuler's working hypothesis leads to facts which prove the existence of corrigible or fatal flaws in the reasoning, without disorder of the affective side, but nevertheless paranoia, the finding is an addition to our knowledge. At present we should designate such cases as freaks of make-up, if they are conceivable at all. If the appreciation of the affective difficulty draws attention to avenues for the saving of the fallible intellectual frame from miscarriage, the study of the affective side will deserve emphasis. Considering that affectivity is the moving and determining principle, and intellect the static apparatus, we had reasons to -welcome the emphasis on the affectivity even in paranoia, and may be able to make the facts useful in dealing with the beginnings of the condition in paying more attention to the affects than to reasoning.

If, further, in the differential analysis of the factor determining the fixation of the disturbance, special perspectives of affectivity, intellect and volition prove of value in addition to the search for physiological and general biological components of the constellation, we can use them systematically for what they are worth without any barriers. From the point of view of nosological differentiation, we may trust that we have safely passed the period when anything short of a comprehensive biological sizing-up could be considered safe ground for conclusions; but even there we have reasons to expect special help from an empirical sizing-up of the ' idées-forces,' in their preeminently affective or intellectual or motor bearing. In other words, dynamic psychology will use the analytical data for what they are worth, and beware of a priori limitation of affective principles and exclusion of the ' intellectual' feelings in psychopathology after they prove so satisfactory in broad and liberal use in the analysis of child-life. Rather take the broadest list of kinds of affective type (such as Baldwin's) than an artificially narrowed one. The affective trend of paranoia is worth much more study than the adverse discriminations by Bleuler would admit.

The chief cause of the artificial self-restriction would seem to lie with a priori views of what should be admitted as affect, and with a priori views of what should be admitted as paranoia. Neither for the one problem nor for the other the necessary work is done. The emphasis on positive and negative affects, to the exclusion of qualitative types, is natural enough in psychophysics and in the study of the physiological accompaniments, which do indeed point to a mere + and — of the blood-wave, and not in favor of Wundt's triple system. But there is no end of possibilities of well-founded qualitative differentiations, and Bleuler's own remark about the affective types — that unfortunately the)' are not studied yet — should have precluded an emphatic and final judgment and exclusion of the ' intellectual' feelings as affective agencies. And the assumption that Kraepelin's paranoia is more than a practical group, and that it should be considered alone in the attempt to determine the final explicability of paranoic developments, is another unfortunate effect of definition at the wrong end.

Berze, whose booklet on paranoia was reviewed in the BULLETIN (Vol. I., 1904, pp. 269-271), discusses Bleuler's study very interestingly and naturally from the point of view of an apperception-disorder.

He shows how Bleuler observes in the beginning nothing but errors such as occur also in the normal, and that merely the fixation of the error stamps the attitude as a delusion, without being explained better than by a 'constitutional disposition' and ' predisposing factors,' possibly of the type emphasized by Freud. In the inquiry into the factor which determines the fixation, Berze's attitude has a certain advantage. His emphasis on an apperception-disorder ('mit dem Gefiihl der Erleidens') is hardly prejudicial, because it is more apt to figure as a mere formula which gives the inquiry into driving factors of the situation or idees-forces a free field, and even urges it, as soon as an interest in 'driving factors ' arises at all. And since nobody doubts the importance of affectivity in apperception, Berze's formula will not become an a priori barrier against investigating the nature and weight of the affective trend in cases of paranoia.

Bleuler states at the very outset (page 5) that the concept 'Gefuhl-Gemut-Emotion-Affect' deals with an abstraction, and that each process has also an intellectual and a voluntary side, and that it is merely a matter of convenience if we speak of [largely] intellectual, [largely] affective, and [largely] voluntary psychic events. If he thinks that theoretically the three sides must be kept apart, I say: Yes, if it really leads to positive advantages. Theory is perspective. Do we really get a better perspective in limiting affectivity ('the affects proper + the slight feelings or feeling-tones of pleasure and pain in all possible experience,' p. 6) so as to exclude the undeniable affective side of the intellectual feelings — merely because we can express the situation sufficiently well in terms of intellectualism ? Is there really any consideration which would force the perspective on us in the face of actual disadvantages. I am not aware of any. The only tangible one is quite relative : The plain emotional disorders are more diffuse (not completely so ; many a case of simple depression can talk indifferently about many topics), while the ones with a stronger intellectual component tend to be more circumscribed (but by no means wholly, as is shown by the vague uneasiness and the fundamental switching-off of the chief vital instincts of conduct of life).

According to Bumke the term Zwangsvorstellung was introduced into German literature by v. Kraft-Ebing, 1867, in connection with the fact that in depressions the stream of ideation becomes painfully limited to what harmonizes with the depression. This constraint in ideation, volition and action exists even where there is no actual confusion of thought and is sometimes felt keenly by the patient.

Griesinger next used the word for conditions in which, contrary to the best intention and conviction of the patient, thoughts recur in the form of questions or otherwise, wholly beyond the control of and against the better knowledge and realization of the senselessness by the patient. This type was fully discussed in a masterly paper by Westphal (1878), who made the following definition: "Imperative concepts are those which, with otherwise intact intelligence and without being determined by an emotional or affective state, assume prominence against the will of the patient, cannot be thrown off, impede and cross the normal course of ideation, and are always recognized as abnormal and strange by the patient who realizes them with his healthy consciousness."

This definition and the cases on which it is based point plainly to the identity of the phenomena with what the French have very properly grouped together under the term obsessions. But while Westphal insisted on the negation of their dependence on emotional or affective conditions, probably in order to offset Krafft-Ebing's limited application of the term to the self-evident dominating influence of depressions on the stream of mental activity, the French never lost sight of the emotional foundation of obsessions insisted upon by Morel, although they distinguish phobias, that is, obsessions consisting of fears, and the ideational obsessions in which the anxiety and uneasiness manifests itself with an idea. In either case the process is felt as involuntary^ automatic, and irresistible.

These French studies were unfortunately ignored by the earlier German writers, and, owing to WestphaPs characteristic tendency toseparate emotional and intellectual disorders and the provocation furnished by Krafft-Ebing's application of the word, there developed a tendency to make a clean-cut division of all the cases that showed uncontrollable ideas with the subjective feeling of obsession, with absence of an emotional or affective state, and recognized as morbid. More extensive clinical experience naturally brought forth the question whether it was admissible to speak of imperative sensations, imperative hallucinations, and imperative acts; imperative affects or moods being excluded at the very outset. Since sensations never give the feeling of freedom or option, they would seem to be something by themselves. In the same way affects are not under voluntary control so as to allow a contrast of voluntary and involuntary forms, but ideas and possibly actions, when they arise directly from imperative ideas, can figure as obsessions. In this compact the phobias are put apart unless their nucleus is an idea (such as the idea of dirt in mysophobia, whereas agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, is not included because the primary feature is an anxiety).

We find here largely on grounds of psychological or logical reasoning a disruption of what clearly belongs together as shown by their appearance on the same etiological foundation, and the frequent transition- types. Practically it is of course of some importance to distinguish whether the obsessions depend on or are accompanied by marked states of anxiety and uneasiness. But to make of the differences a fundamental issue and to cultivate the inquiry habitual to a certain type of German psychiatry, whether in any given case the emotional disturbance is primary or secondary, and whether therefore we have an emotional or an intellectual disease, is bowing to a mere system of thought, and belittling the rules of empiricism.

The Anglo-Saxon literature has steered remarkably free of such dogmatic outgrowths. When associationism became very pronounced it was neutralized by an instinctive indifference by the physicians working with the conditions in question. The whole discussion of Bumke gives one the idea that over the quibbling and the desire to Jive up to psychological definitions he becomes wholly incapable of a broad grasp on the recent discussions of this topic by Janet, Friedmann, Loewenfeld and others.

Bumke's review shows very clearly the advantages and disadvantages of pushing systematic considerations, with special attention to the system and definition and laws. These highly systematic conceptions may give a feeling of perfection and superiority over empiricism. But here, as in the paranoia problem, they lead their devotees away from the affection for the plain facts, the cases become degraded to imperfect illustrations, and that which should above all things be the starting point of new trends, a new response to concrete events, is surrendered for a plan of doubtful fertility. We may be able to learn a great deal from an analysis of our thought and deductions about things, but as soon as such analysis distracts from what I just called the instinctive affection for the concrete events, we cannot help but suspect an estrangement from the best roads of natural science.

If we obey our soundest instincts, we study events far less for their absolute nature than in order to learn the conditions under which they arise and under which they can be modified. Apart from this, there may be a justified craving for systematic knowledge, but that should be considered as something of a private hobby, or possibly a yielding to scholastic traditions owing to its didactic advantages. It should be judged by its fruitfulness in the creation of heuristic hypotheses and only secondarily by the pleasure and satisfaction it gives to the author and to lovers of word-architecture.

In the Archiv f. Psychiatrte, Vol. VIII., on p. 748, Westphal reviews the phenomena of obsessions in the normal (naturally, for him, with the excluding of the states depending on emotions or affects), and with a suggestion of a desire for more facts in an as yet poorly explored field, he refers to a pastor who had an anticipation of dizziness, a suspension of thought in any room above ground, with an unpleasant feeling in his body. He remarks that such a case cannot be denied a somewhat different position from the other 'Zwangsvorstellungen,' and the end of his paper suggests that, had he not been committed to his idea of primary and secondary emotions and affects as a fundamental principle in psychiatry, and had he had a wider experience with obsessions, he would have been forced to accept a broader view than Bumke wants to limit himself to, thirty years after Westphal.

In all these systematic attempts we meet a very fundamental issue with regard to the shaping of psychopathological methods. Definitions and law-making instincts are a problematic aid in this field, and apt to do as much harm as good. When they attend to the accessible issues, the determination and differentiation of concrete components of events, and leave the grouping of the necessarily complex events subject to practical differentiation, they have a healthy role; but how can we expect to make useful definitions of that which naturally ramifies and is divergent owing to the introduction of factors which cannot be included in definitions, and where every special instance demands a specific inquiry? Scholasticism has produced a hypertrophy in the faith in definitions, and an irradiation of their application to domains in which they have merely verbal value and become an obstacle to sound empiricism. Definitions of words are always welcome; but they should not claim to be definitions of facts unless they can be proved to deserve it.

Psychopathology is full of such blunders. Definitions of insanity and of various forms of insanity are almost all in this boat; they usually stultify inquiry because they clip the individual case of many of its facts, and overstate what little is known of some rule-of-thumb deduction. The desire for definitions in domains which must be left to empirical rules is a caricature of the sense of accuracy, very much as labor in statistics when the number of cases is thought to make up for inaccuracy in the majority of single cases. Psychopathology needs perspectives rather than definitions, lines of inquiry rather than a priori clipping of the object of investigation, and a veritable feeling of sanctity of the individual case in all its manifestations. To group what has proved sensible and helpful in the sizing-up of a hundred kindred cases, a process of natural summation of experience, is quite a different method from doctrinal splitting of emotion and intellect, and from starting with a definition, be it that of Kraepelin or Westphal.

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