In defense of the genuineness of the psychotic manifestations of these patients, I would recall again the transitory mental disturbances of students undergoing examinations. The genuine loss of all knowledge of well-known facts which the old-time strict and severe schoolmasters frequently provoked in school children, differs very little from the pseudo-dementia with which we are dealing here. It concerns a similar total blocking and inhibition of all thought processes, and, like all psychogenetic disorders, has a tendency to disappear upon the removal of the causative factor. Still, nobody would think for one moment that the child malingers when it is unable to answer questions, though these might concern well-known facts. The consequences of failure to recognize this acute prison-psychotic-complex as a genuine mental disorder may prove to be very disastrous when we remember to what extent the symptomatology of these psychoses is dependent upon environmental conditions. THE DEGENERATIVE PSYCHOSES I have considered thus far those psychogenetic mental disorders, the etiologic factor of which consisted of a single, more or less isolated emotional occurrence. We have seen that the majority of these patients showed very little, if anything, in their past life which was in any way incompatible with leading a more or less successful existence in the community in which they lived. These patients, we might say, would never have been brought to the attention of the psychiatrist had it not been for the occurrence in their life of an experience which provoked a mental breakdown.