The evolution and dissolution of the sexual instinct / by Charles Féré.

  • Charles Féré
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The evolution and dissolution of the sexual instinct / by Charles Féré. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    character, but also because it chronicles the connection between love at first sight and false remembrance. This latter illusion causes us to fancy that some object, coming under our notice for the first time, has already caused us to experience the same sensations. In ordinary cases, the sense of sight is alone called into question. The phantasy of the “ already seen ” is met with in literature under various disguises. Wigan has noticed it fully, and this phenomenon seems so frequent nowadays, so ready to crop up under such varying and shadowy circumstances,1 that it becomes difficult to fix its value as a symptom. It is, however, no normal manifestation, and we are forced to agree with Crichton Browne, who says that it generally appears in neurotic individuals, and may even be the sign of a morbid state.2 Hughlings Jackson, in the same way, quotes a case in which false memory constituted the aura of an epileptic fit. Crichton Browne alludes to a like fact. These false remembrances, always showing themselves in the same manner, linked by constant association, must not be confounded with identical isolated illusory reminiscences, manifesting themselves, although rarely,3 to epileptic sufferers (Neumann, Jensen, Sander) as well as to other neuropaths. Besides, false memory occurs just as well in the aura of megrim as in that of epilepsy.4 The connection between false memory and love at first sight, as well as their morbid origin, can be satisfactorily noted in the following instance :— 1 Royce. Hallucinations of Memory and Telepathy, (Mind, i838, vol. XIII, p. 224.) 2 J. Crichton Browne. On Dreamy Mental States, 8vo, 1895, p. 6. 3 E. B. Leroy. Etudes sur l'illusion de fausse reconnaissance chez les aliénés et les sujets normaux, th. 1898. 4 Ch. Féré. La fausse réminiscence dans l'aura de la migraine, ( Journal de neurologie, 1898, September 5.) H