Hallucinations and illusions : a study of the fallacies of perception / by Edmund Parish.
- Edmund Parish
- Date:
- 1897
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Hallucinations and illusions : a study of the fallacies of perception / by Edmund Parish. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![parts depended on some maltreatment or uncomfortable resting- place of his buried leg, one of Professor James's correspondents wrote that he had already disinterred and chang-ed its position eight times, and he asked the Professor to advise him whether to dig it up again, saying he dreaded to. The case of longest duration reported is that of a man who had had a thigh amputa- tion performed at the age of thirteen years, and who, after he was seventy, still felt the lost foot distinctly. The imaginary position of the amputated part varies : either it maintains an independent position of its own, or it follows the movements of the sound limb, or it may even appear fixed in the attitude it occupied immediately before the operation. A shoulder-joint case said his arm seemed to He on his breast with closed fingers, just as it did eight or ten hours before amputation. As an explanation of this phenomenon, described by Du Prel as a feeling of spiritual unity (Integritatsgefuhl), and by him adduced as a proof of the existence of an astral body,^ Professor James goes on to assume that just as cer- tain brain-centres respond to any and every stimulus by sensations of light and of sound, so do certain other centres respond by the sensation of a foot, with its toes, heel, etc. In the normal state the foot thus felt is located where the eye can see and the hand touch it. This immediate inner sensation still persists, even when the foot is cut off, and would naturally, one may suppose, be located about where it used to be, in the absence of any counter-motive. There would be such a counter-motive if nerves normally excited by foot-sensations were to find themselves excited every time the stump was touched; and foot-sensations and stump-sensations being thus associated, would end by merging in each other. This merging does take place in many cases of what Gueriot calls subjective heterotopy, that is to say, that the extremity, immediately after the operation, seems to be in its old place, but by degrees approaches the stump. This feeling of gradual shrinkage generally depends on the feeling of the contact of the extremity with the stump. The hand may seem to spring directly from the shoulder, or the foot from the knee. A sensation may also be experienced as though the extremity were diminishing in •^ Du Prel, Die Moiiistische Seelenkhre, pp. 157-166; English trans- lation, The Philosophy of ]\Iysticisin^ 1889.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2107141x_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
