Clinical psychiatry : a textbook for students and physicians, abstracted and adapted from the 6th German edition of Kraepelin's "Lehrbuch der psychiatrie" / by A. Ross. Diefendorf.

  • Emil Kraepelin
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical psychiatry : a textbook for students and physicians, abstracted and adapted from the 6th German edition of Kraepelin's "Lehrbuch der psychiatrie" / by A. Ross. Diefendorf. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    warrants the designation of a flight of ideas, but the insta- bility of single ideas which are unable to exert any influ- ence over the course of the train of thought. In flight of ideas the direction of the train of thought is determined by external impressions, chance ideas, or finally by simple associations, external or internal. The influence of chance ideas is well demonstrated in intoxica- tion deliria, and especially in opium intoxication, in which vivid ideas of the imagination follow each other in a variegated series, giving rise to an incoherent progression of unrelated fancies, to which experience offers no key. This might be called the delirious form of flight of ideas. The rambling thought of the hypomaniacal patient is another form of the flight of ideas in which the patients are diverted by unimportant ideas, reminiscences, and incidents, and need to be frequently led back to their sub- ject. The following is an example (the patient being asked when she left the Hartford Retreat): My mother came for me in January. She had on a black bombazine of Aunt Jane's. One shoestring of her own and got another from neighbor Jenkins. She lives in a little white house kitty corner of our'n. Come up with an old green umbrella 'cause it rained. You know it can rain in Janu- ary when there is a thaw. Snow wasn't more than half an inch deep, hog-killing time, they butchered eight that winter, made their own sausages, cured hams, and tried out their lard. They had a smoke house. [But how about your leaving Hartford ?] She got up to Hartford on the half-past eleven train and it was raining like all get out. Dr. Butler was having dinner, codfish, twasn't Friday, he ain't no Catholic, just sat with his back to the door and talked and laughed and talked. Here, in spite of many diversions, we see a fairly good sequence in the content of