A textbook of mental diseases.

  • Lewis, W. Bevan.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A textbook of mental diseases. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    from visual and other special senses to tactual and general sense, as well as the far less definite organic or visceral sensations. All those ingoing currents which arouse, more or less definitely, our knowledge of the existence of a body, its limbs, musculature, and viscera, conjointly aid in the elaboration of the ego or personal identity. But the ego is far more than this. We must associate therewith those representations of the same, and moreover the faint aggregate as Spencer terms it, of states aroused by presentative cognitions of the outer kosmos. Our sentiments, ideas, emotions, as well as our memory of presenta- tive states, all alike go to form that complex elaboration—personal identity, which is severed sharply from the vivid aggregate known as the non-ego—the physical in contradistinction to the physiological environment. Now, since in all normal states, the internal order bears a definite relationship to the outer order of things, when either of these is profoundly disturbed, the identity tends to suffer con- siderably, as indicated by Sully. We are all acquainted with transient confusion of identity, in those waking states when we fail to realise the impressions suddenly received from the environment; and were the latter completely and suddenly transformed, we should fail to restore immediately the balance necessary to re-establish our own identity. So, when the internal mechanism is deranged, and the orderly relationship of inner to outer kosmos is confused, personal identity is apt correspondingly to suffer. We have already seen how this may occur in the progressive failure of object consciousness. The failure to appreciate external relationships, again, is associated with that gathering gloom, that sense of outward resistance, fear, and inseciirity of the non-ego already alluded to. Impressions from the outer world fail to arouse the normal representative states of cogni- tion, but aid in the welling-up of the emotional life of the subject, and it is'from this latter source that falsifications of Sense arise. As subject-consciousness becomes more and more pronounced with failure of object-consciousness, all impressions alike, received from the non-ego, become the pabulum for the growth of an all-pervading egoism. The subject broods over his multiform and novel feelings- morbid introspection and egoistic musings replace the healthy altruistic feelincrs and sentiments : and, since the emotional life is itself in part the origin of representative cognitions of the outer kosmos, so out of this source them now arise falsifications of the environment. The pervading gloom, the sense of objective restriction, and the emotional states so aroused, attract to themselves like groupings of ideas- attempts at explanation, as Griesinger has It J and this state progressing, tends eventually to the establishment of a neW nexus of ideas correlated to impressions received from without, m