I did not know how to abridge the ingenious demonstrations of Freud.
Let us now return to the question of dissociated series of ideas. We now see what meaning Freud gives to Gross's assumed dissociations. They are nothing other than the repressed complexes found in hysteria,[1] and last but not least also in the normal.[2] The mystery of repressed series of ideas reveals itself as a psychological mechanism of general significance and of quite usual occurrence. Freud puts in a new light the problem of incongruity between the content of consciousness and emotional tone discussed by Stransky. He shows that indifferent, even insignificant ideas may be accompanied by intense feeling tones which they take from a repressed idea. Freud uncovers a way which can lead us to the understanding of the inadequate feeling tone in dementia præcox. I need hardly discuss the significance of this. The results of Freud's investigations may be summed up as follows:
Both in form and in content of the symptoms of paranoid dementia præcox there are thoughts which in consequence of their disagreeable tone became unbearable to the conscious ego, and hence are repressed. They determine the nature of the delusions and hallucinations as well as the whole general behavior. Whenever apperceptive paralysis appears in a person the manifested automatisms contain the dissociated idea complexes—the whole army of subjected thoughts become unyoked. Thus we may generalize the result of Freud's analysis.
As everybody knows, Tiling,[3] uninfluenced by Freud, and based on clinical experience, came to conclusions closely resembling those of Freud. He, too, would contribute to individuality an almost boundless significance for the origin and formation of the psychosis. The importance of individual psychology is undoubtedly underestimated in modern psychiatry, owing less perhaps to theoretical reasons than to the helplessness of practical psychology. One can therefore cover a great distance with
