Text-book of insanity : based on clinical observations for practitioners and students of medicine.
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing
- Date:
- 1904
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Text-book of insanity : based on clinical observations for practitioners and students of medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
79/666 (page 57)
![Moreover, ideas which physiologically excite pleasure under such circumstances are capable only of exciting painful affects. At the height of the disease every psychic process, even mere sensory per- ception, induces such emotional states (psychic hyperesthesia); just as a nerve, the irritability of which normally lies deep, when affected with neuralgia reacts with painful paroxysms to mechanical, thermic, and atmospheric stimuli that otherwise would be without effect. ISTot infrequently such states of psychic hyperesthesia are accompanied by conditions of sensorial and sometimes cutaneous hyperesthesia. Affects are simply painful (sadness, despair), surprising (embar- rassment, confusion, astonishment, and shame), or, most frequently, expectant (anxiety, fear). In states of pleasurable sensibility and expansive feeling of self (mania) the disturbance is manifested in joyous affects, under circum- stances where normally only pleasurable feelings would be manifested. In these cases, too, at thö height of the disease, phases are met in which there is a condition of true psychic hyperesthesia, in so far as every thought and even perception is associated with an affect, and the patient lives in a continued state of joyful emotion (hyperhedonia —Emminghaus; hypermetamorphosis—ISTeumann). ' If the feeling of self is not depressed, and the idea provoking the affect is one associated with painful feelings, then the resulting affect is the so-called mixed affect of anger. In this state of angry feeling the slightest causes—a glance, a gesture, even a kind word—may suffice to induce repeated explosions of anger in the sensitive patient. (C) Anomalies in the Quality of Emotional Coloring. There are abnormal states of feeling in which the concrete idea is no longer accom]3anied by the physiologic emotional coloring or that previously characteristic of the individual, but by another state of feel- ing, which, under some circumstances, may be the exact opposite of that which should normally occur (perversion of feeling, paralgia-—• Emminghaus—analogous to the abnormal reaction of sensory nerves). This anomaly rests upon the assumption that notwithstanding the old saying, de gustibus certain impressions under normal cir- cumstances produce like emotional reaction in different individuals. Here we are dealing, not with a loss of certain normal emotional reactions, as in cases of emotional dullness, but with reactions that are in contrast with those which, in accordance with experience, are normal to the individual and to mankind in general. For this reason, per- verse colorings of the emotions more readily and clearly appear abnor^](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21215856_0079.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
