Collected Papers on Analytical PsychologyJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Science
Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Psychoanalysis
Forty-five per cent. of the patients suffer from the real and common
mental disease called dementia præcox. The name is a very unhappy one,
for the dementia is not always precocious, nor in all cases is there
dementia. Unfortunately the disease is too often incurable; even in the
best cases, in those that recover, where the outside public would not
observe any abnormality, there is always present some defect in the
emotional life. The picture presented by the disease is extraordinarily
diverse; generally there is some disorder of feeling, frequently
delusions and hallucinations. As a rule there is nothing to be found in
the brain. Even in cases of a most severe type, lasting for years, an
intact brain is not infrequently found _post mortem_. In a few cases
only certain slight changes are present which, however, cannot as yet be
reduced to any law.
To sum up: in round figures a quarter of our insane patients show more
or less clearly extensive changes and destruction of the brain, while
three-fourths have a brain which seems to be generally unimpaired or at
most exhibit such changes as give no explanation of the psychological
disturbance.
These figures offer the best possible proof that the purely
morphological view-point of modern psychiatry leads only very
indirectly, if at all, to the understanding of the mental disorder,
which is our aim. We must take into account the fact that those mental
diseases which show the most marked disturbances of the brain end in
death; for this reason the chronic inmates of the asylum form its real
population, consisting of some 70 to 80 per cent. of cases of dementia
præcox, that is, of patients in whom anatomical changes are practically
non-existent. The psychiatry of the future must come to grips with the
core of the thing; the path is thus made clear--_it can only be by way
of psychology_. Hence in our Zürich clinic we have entirely discarded
the anatomical view and turned to the psychological investigation of
insanity. As most of our patients suffer from dementia præcox we were
naturally concerned with this as our chief problem.
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