even in the hysteric. From this it can also be concluded that the patient's psychical activtiy is fully occupied by the complex. She is under the yoke of the complex, she speaks, acts and dreams of nothing else but what the complex inspires. There seems to exist some intellectual weakness which expresses itself in a tendency towards definitions, which, however, in contradistinction to the reactions of imbecility does not tend towards generalization,[1] but the content of the stimulus is defined or designated in the sense of the complex. What is characteristic here is the unusual affectedness and embellishment of the expressions which often merge into incomprehensibility. The awkward and peculiarly sounding definitions of imbeciles are found at situations which are intellectually somewhat difficult, where they are of course to be expected; but here the affected definitions appear in unexpected locations which accidentally stimulate the complex. In the normal and hysteric we always see striking and disturbed reactions, such as unusual or foreign words, in the critical situations. Corresponding to this we have here the neologisms which represent nothing else than especially forceful and rich expressions for the complex-thought. Hence we also understand why the patient designates her neologisms as "power-words." Wherever they appear they always refer to the whole system hidden behind them, similarly to technical terms in normal language.
We see then that the complex is connected with the most far-fetched words; it assimilates, as it were, everything.
In the normal and hysterical we see similar relations in complexes with very strong feeling-tones where the affect is still fresh. In regard to the experiment the patient behaves like a person with a fresh affect. In reality this is naturally not the case, but the effects on the associations are such as can only occur in strong affects; that is, by far most of the reactions are constellated in the clearest manner by subjective complexes. This fact is explained by the hypothesis constructed in the preceding chapters, namely, that in the content of dementia præcox there is an abnormally strong affect which becomes fixed at the onset of the disease. If this hypothesis be correct and holds true for all forms of dementia præcox we have to expect the associations in dementia præcox to be characterized by the presence of
- ↑ Comp. II Beitrag des Diagnost. Assoz.-Stud.
