origin of linguistic or mimic stereotypies, we often find the associated emotional content. Later the content always becomes more indistinct just as in the normal or in the hysterical automatism. But in dementia præcox the corresponding process seems to run a more rapid and thorough course, so that one soon reaches the vacuum as regards content and emotion.
As experience undoubtedly teaches, it is not only the complex-content that becomes stereotyped in dementia præcox, but also accidental material. It is known that the verbigerating patients will take up an accidental stray word and repeat it constantly. Heilbronner, Stransky and others justly interpret such phenomena as symptoms of association-vacuums. The motility stereotypies can also be easily interpreted in the same manner. We know that precocious dements suffer very frequently from associative obstructions ("thought-deprivation"). This disappearance of thought is found by preference around the complex. If then the complex plays the enormous role entrusted to it, it is to be expected that it very frequently absorbs many thoughts, and in this way disturbs the fonction du réel. In the place of the alienated realms it creates association-vacuums and those phenomena of perseveration which may be explained by the "vacuum."
It is a characteristic of most of the ontogenetically acquired automatisms that they are subjected to gradual changes. The anamneses of Tiquers (see Meige et Feindel, "Le Tic") afford many proofs of that. The catatonic automatisms are no exceptions, they too change slowly, frequently the transformation
of senseless phrases and neologisms. This is due to the simultaneous existence of the decaying and exciting processes in the central apparatus of speech which make their clear manifestation impossible, and instead of stereotyped thoughts [as results of paralogic-paraphasic malformations] only unintelligible remnants come to view.") There is still another way in which the decay of speech can undermine the manifestations of correct ideation stereotypies, and that is, that (on account of the disturbances in the recoinage of ideas and thoughts both in word and speech) through the monotonous repetition of ideas no equivalent speech formation can be incited. In the conversion of thought to expression of speech, numerous paralogic derailments occur, the presentations become erroneously associated, changing everywhere, so that, forthwith, in place of the thought stereotypy which remains hidden, there is a reproduction of constantly changing nonsense.
