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Abstract
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For a scientific understanding of dementia praecox, it is necessary not only to list and describe the symptomatology, but to study the mental conditions from the standpoint of the relations that the manifest symptoms have to each other, and to determine what is central, and, as it were, causative, and what is peripheral and contingent. These phenomena are so little known that their incidence is not necessarily indicative of mental disease. The author suggests that dementia praecox is essentially a progressive disturbance of the emotional life, a weakening of negative self feeling without a compensatory development of positive self feeling. Clinical findings point to this view, and the mental processes in dementia praecox are of the kind that would be expected in normal individuals whose emotional life was temporarily disturbed in this way. Delusions are so characterized because they fail to meet the test of reality. For the patient, the meaning of the delusion is not in the real world, but in the language which he employs to express his meaning. The total picture of dementia praecox is that of a mind that has allowed the emotional disturbances that normally accompany the common failures of life to become the central and controlling motive of its thought and action. The disease, a psychologically considered, is a series of efforts it makes to reëstablish itself in the community of its fellows, but in the wrong way. Whatever the form, there is always a false direction of personal activities that have their basis in the one-sided importance attached to self feeling. The intellect undergoes a progressive deterioration because of the insufficiency of the affective motive, and the increasing inadequacy of objective material due to the narrowing of contacts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)
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