special value, for we have here a quite elementary automatic phenomenon. It may be called hysterical in so far as in this concrete case a state of exhaustion and intoxication with its parallel manifestations can be excluded. A healthy person only exceptionally allows himself to be so engaged by an object that he fails to correct the errors of a dispersed attention—those of the kind described. The frequency of these occurrences in the patient, point to a considerable limitation of the field of consciousness in so far as she can only master a relative minimum of elementary sensations flowing in at the same time. If we wish to describe more exactly the psychological state of the “psychic shady side,” we might call it either a sleeping or a dream-state, according as passivity or activity predominated. There is, at all events, a pathological dream state of very rudimentary extension and intensity; its genesis is spontaneous; dream-states arising spontaneously with the production of automatisms are generally regarded on the whole as hysterical. It must be pointed out that these instances of misreading occurred frequently in the patient, and that the term hysterical is employed in this sense; so far as we know, it is only on a foundation of hysterical constitution that spontaneous states of partial sleep or dreams occur frequently.
Binet[1] has studied experimentally the automatic substitution of some adjacent association in his hysterics. If he pricked the anæsthetic hand of the patient without his noticing the prick, he thought of “points”; if the anæsthetic finger was moved, he thought of “sticks” or “columns.” When the anæsthetic hand, concealed from the patient’s sight by a screen, writes “Salpêtrière,” the patient sees in front of her the word “Salpêtrière” in white writing on a black ground. This recalls the experiments above referred to of Guinon and Sophie Waltke.
We thus find in the patient, at a time when there was nothing to indicate the later phenomena, rudimentary automatisms, fragments of dream manifestations, which bear in themselves the possibility that some day more than one
- ↑ Binet, “Les altérations de la personnalité.”
