Mental pathology in its relation to normal psychology : a course of lectures delivered in the University of Leipzig / by Gustav Störring ; translated by Thomas Loveday.

  • Störring, Gustav, 1860-
Date:
1907
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mental pathology in its relation to normal psychology : a course of lectures delivered in the University of Leipzig / by Gustav Störring ; translated by Thomas Loveday. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    her hands in-the air, but when she got across to the wall she at first shrank back in surprise. She then groped her way thus : she went first to one end of the wall and then tried to find the door of her ward among the various doors along the wall by feeling after the recesses which serve to give access to the heating- apparatus, and in this way she found the right door at once, plainly judging by the number of recesses. The principal point to observe here is that this patient showed herself able to reproduce visual ideas—for, of course, it was only through their assistance that she succeeded in finding her way by means of touch—although she was incapable of visual sensa- tions, and that not owing to any derangement of the peripheral sense-organ nor of the centripetal conduction, but owing to a purely central derangement, for the mental fog of hysteria depends wholly on central conditions. When Janet maintains on the strength of hypnotic experi- ments that loss of sensibility in any sense brings with it loss of the power of reproducing corresponding ideas, I cannot help thinking that unintentional suggestion must have been operative, as is often the case in such experiments. In my patient visual sensibility was lost, but the power of reproducing visual ideas was retained ; on the other hand, in a case of Charcot’s visual representations were very weak, whilst visual sensations seemed normal. This patient of Charcot’s had previous to his disorder been remarkable for the unusual development of his visual ideas. “ His memory,” Charcot’s pupil Ballet reports*, “ was above all a visual memory. He no sooner thought of persons or things than the representations of their features, forms, and colours appeared before his mind’s eye with as much precision and intensity, so he assures us, as if they were real objects. If he wanted to recall a fact or a figure contained in his voluminous polyglot correspondence, he found it at once in the letters them- selves, which appeared before him in their exact wording down to the least detail, irregularity, and erasure. At school when he repeated a lesson, or later if he recited a passage from some favourite author, to have read it two or three times sufficed to fix the page in his memory with every line and letter on it, the passage at once appeared to him quite distinctly, and he recited it by mentally reading it off. To do a sum in addition he had * Le Langage intdrieur et les diverses formes de Paphasie, p. 43 and pp. 101-2. [cp. James, Vol. II, p. 58.—7>.]