Aside from this slight inconvenience, I believe that I may call Gross's hypothesis a rather happy one. It tells us in brief that the roots of old automatic phenomena lie in the unconscious association connections. If consciousness becomes disintegrated (abaissement du niveau mental—apperceptive weakness) the complexes accompanying it are freed from all restraint and are then able to break into the ego-consciousness. This is an eminent psychological conception, and agrees in the clearest possible manner with the doctrines of the French school, with the experience of hypnotism, and with the analysis of hysteria. If we weaken the power of consciousness by suggestion and produce thereby a split-off series of presentations, as, for example, in post-hypnotic commands, we find that this series reappears with a power inexplicable to the ego-consciousness. In the psychology of ecstatic somnambulists we have the typical breaking in of split-off ideas.[1]
Unfortunately Gross leaves one question open, and that is, which are the dissociated series of ideas and what is the nature of their content? Some time ago, long before Gross wrote, Freud answered this question very brilliantly. As far back as 1893 Freud[2] showed preliminarily that a hallucinatory delirium originates from an unfulfilled wish, and that this delirium is a compensation for unsatisfied yearnings, that the person takes refuge, as it were, in the psychosis in order to find in the dreamlike delirium of the disease that which was refused to him in reality. In 1896 Freud analyzed a paranoid condition, Kraepelin's paranoid form of dementia præcox, and showed how the symptoms were accurately determined according to the scheme of the transformation mechanism of hysteria. Freud then stated that paranoia, or the group of cases belonging to paranoia, are a defensive neuropsychosis; that is to say, that just like hysteria and obsessions, they, too, originate from the repression of painful memories, and that the form of the symptoms is determined by the content of the repression.[3]
