Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases

THE CAUSATION AND TREATMENT OF PSYCHOPATHIC DISEASES

Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D.
Boston: R. Badger, 1916

THERE is another factor which helps to arouse the fear instinct, and thus plays an important role in the causation of psychopathic maladies. This factor is a narrow, suggestible personal life. In my work “The Psychology of Suggestion,” I proved by a series of experiments that the conditions of suggestibility are: Fixation of attention, monotony, limitation of voluntary movements, limitation of the field of consciousness, inhibition. I have shown that these conditions are favorable to disaggregation of consciousness. I have pointed out that a disaggregation of consciousness with an inhibition of the controlling, waking consciousness is one of the important conditions in the causation of subconscious states with their accompanying abnormal suggestibility. In other words, the inhibition of the personal self, or even the limitation of the personal self, helps the formation of dissociations which constitute the soil of all psychopathic diseases. When the person, therefore, is limited in his interests, is narrow in his range of knowledge, is ignorant and superstitious, and his critical personal self is embryonic and undeveloped, the predisposition to mental disaggregation is pronounced. The fear instinct has full sway in the production of psychopathic states. With the limitation and inhibition of the critical personal self, with the limitation and narrowness of personal life interests, there goes an increase of the sense of the unknown and the mysterious, cultivated by religion and superstition, with the baneful consequence of the development of the fear instinct,—the cause of psychopathic affections.

In the embryonic personality of the child as well as in the undeveloped or narrowed individuality of the adult the sense of the strange, of the unknown and the mysterious, is especially apt to arouse the fear instinct. In fact, the unfamiliar arouses the fear instinct even in the more highly organized mind. “Any new uncertainty,” says Bain, “is especially the cause of terror. We become habituated to a frequent danger, and realize the full force of apprehension only when the evil is previously unknown. Such are the terrors caused by epidemics, the apprehensions from an unexperienced illness, the feeling of a recruit under fire. . . . The mental system in infancy is highly susceptible, not merely to pain, but to shocks and surprises. Any great excitement has a perturbing effect allied to fear. After the child has contracted a familiarity with the persons and things around it, it manifests unequivocal fear on the occurrence of anything very strange. The grasp of an unknown person often gives a fright. This early experience very much resembles the manifestations habitual to the inferior animals.” In another place Bain rightly says, "Our position in the world contains the sources of fear. The vast powers of nature dispose of our lives and happiness with irresistible might and awful aspect. Ages had elapsed ere the knowledge of law and uniformity prevailing among those powers was arrived at by the human intellect. The profound ignorance of the primitive man (and, we may add, of the undeveloped, limited, and superstitious adult) was the soil wherein his early conceptions and theories sprang up; and the fear inseparable from ignorance gave them their character. The essence of superstition is expressed by the definition of fear. An altogether exaggerated estimate of things, the ascription of evil agency to the most harmless objects, and false apprehensions everywhere, are among the attributes of the superstitious man.”

Compayré, in speaking of the fear of the child, says, “In his limited experience of evil, by a natural generalization, he suspects danger everywhere, like a sick person whose aching body dreads in advance every motion and every contact. He feels that there is a danger everywhere, behind the things that he cannot understand, because they do not fit in with his experience. The observations collected by Romanes in his interesting studies on the intelligence of animals throw much light on this question; they prove that dogs, for instance, do not fear this or that, except as they are ignorant of the cause. A dog was very much terrified one day when he heard a rumbling like thunder produced by throwing apples on the floor of the garret; he seemed to understand the cause of the noise as soon as he was taken to the garret, and became as quiet and happy as ever. Another dog had a habit of playing with dry bones. One day Romanes attached a fine thread which could hardly be seen, to one of the bones, and while the dog was playing with it, drew it slowly toward him; the dog recoiled in terror from the bone, which seemed to be moving of its own accord. So skittish horses show fright as long as the cause of the noise that frightens them remains unknown and invisible to them. It is the same with the child. When in the presence of all these things around him, of which he has no idea, these sounding objects, these forms, these movements, whose cause he does not divine, he is naturally a prey to vague fears. He is just what we should be if chance should cast us suddenly into an unexplored country before strange objects and strange beings—suspicious, always on the qui vive, disposed to see imaginary enemies behind every bush, fearing a new danger at every turn in the road.”

Similarly, Sully says, “The timidity of childhood is seen in the readiness with which experience invests objects and places with a fear-exciting aspect, in its tendency to look at all that is unknown as terrifying and in the difficulty of the educator in controlling these tendencies.” Sully is right in thinking that intellectual culture tends greatly to reduce the early intensity of fear. “This it does by substituting knowledge for ignorance, and so undermining that vague terror before the unknown to which the child and the superstitious savage are a prey, an effect aided by the growth of will power and the attitude of self-confidence which this brings with it.” An uncultivated personality with a limited mental horizon, with a narrow range of interests, a personality sensitive to the moral categorical imperative, a personality trained in the fear of the Lord and mysterious agencies, is a fit subject for obsessions by the fear instinct.

In certain types of functional psychosis and neurosis the patient has an inkling of the fear instinct in his dread of objects, or of states of mind, moral scruples, lack of confidence, blushing, religious or social expectations of some coming misfortune and some mysterious evil, but he is not aware of the fear instinct as developed in him by the events and training of early childhood. The fears of early childhood are subconscious. At any rate, the patient does not connect them with his present mental affection. In other types of psychopathic affections the patient is entirely unaware of the whole situation, he is engrossed by the symptoms which he regards as the sum and substance of his trouble; the fear is entirely subconscious.

The fear instinct fostered by frights, scares, dread of sickness, by religious instruction with its fear of the Lord, by moral and religious injunctions and duties with fear of punishment or failure in the moral standard and duties, the enforcement of social injunctions with the consequent dread of failure and degradation,—all go to the cultivation of the fear instinct which in later life becomes manifested as functional psychosis with all its baneful effects. Thus a psychoneurotic in his account writes: “I dwell on my childish acts because of my religious training, because of the superstitions charged with religious and pseudo-moral emotions.” The fear of the Lord, especially when cultivated in early childhood, is not only as the Bible has it, “the beginning of (religious) wisdom,” but is also the beginning of morbid mental states, the source of psychopathic affections.

“Natura enim rerum omnibus viventibus indidit metum ac formidinem, vita atque essentia suae conservatricem, ac mala ingruentia vitantem et depellentem. Verumtamen eadem natura modum tenere nescia est, sed timoribus salutaribus semper vanos et inanes admiscet; adeo ut omnia—(si intus conspici darentur) Panicis terroribus plenissima sint, praesertim humana.”