The major symptoms of hysteria : fifteen lectures given in the Medical School of Harvard University [between the fifteenth of October and the end of November, 1906] / by Pierre Janet.

  • Janet, Pierre, 1859-1947.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The major symptoms of hysteria : fifteen lectures given in the Medical School of Harvard University [between the fifteenth of October and the end of November, 1906] / by Pierre Janet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    nervous tension is lowered, especially with those hered- itarily predisposed. There are some physiological periods, puberty for instance, at which the vital forces seem to be busy elsewhere and to leave no great re- source to the brain. There are diseases that, through a thousand mechanisms, through local lesions, through intoxication, through microbian infection, lower our nervous tension. Even in normal functioning, physical or intellectual fatigue is enough to produce momentarily the same result. Lastly, — the fact is more difficult to understand but incontestable, — emotion is character- ized by this lowering of the nervous strength. Very likely, in emotion, there is a great expense of nervous strength necessitated by the new problem suddenly set, and the emotional disturbance must come close to that of fatigue. However it may be, our patients have been exhausted through one of the preceding causes. If hereditarily predisposed, they are enfeebled by puberty, or they succumb to intoxication, fatigue, or emotion. The diminution, the lowering of the ner- vous tension, may bring about a general lowering of all the functions, and especially of the highest. This is what takes place in the psychasthenic neuroses, in which the localization on a special point exists in a rather slight degree. With hystericals, in consequence of particular dis- positions, the lowering of the nervous strength produces, in some manner, a superficial retraction; there is, as it were, an autotomy. Consciousness, which is no longer able to perform too complex operations, gives up some of them. There is, it is true, a general en-