Such troubles are unmistakable tics. The mechanism of their production
is identical, be the actual localisation brachial, facial, or laryngeal,
and this applies in particular to the motor verbal hallucinations so
excellently studied by Séglas. As a matter of fact, tics of speech are
often nothing more than the mode of exteriorisation of these
hallucinations. The same is the case with verbal impulsions.
In this rubric of tics of speech we may class various cases recorded
under differing titles, among which an interesting one due to Pitres may
be quoted:
Subsequently to his retirement from active business pursuits, the
patient, a man fifty-nine years old, became depressed, morose, and
irritable, till insomnia at length drove him in desperation to
attempt suicide. By the merest chance he failed of his purpose. The
development of involuntary sounds a few weeks later was followed at
the end of a month by the equally involuntary ejaculation of his
wife's and children's names--"Numa! Helen! Camille! Maria!" This
habit persisted for as long as fourteen months, after which during
three years he enjoyed excellent health. Owing to financial
worries, however, a relapse occurred. Every few minutes he uttered
various articulate cries in a loud, clear, and well-modulated
voice, sometimes repeating the four names with great rapidity, at
others calling out the same name with increasing violence. Severe
convulsive twitches of arm and trunk musculature synchronised with
his exclamations. The patient was incapable of either restraining
or even modifying the cries; he was equally unable to replace one
by another, to say Henry instead of Numa, or Jean instead of Helen.
For hours at a stretch he would repeat the names of friends who had
come to visit him; on the day before a consultation on his case his
one cry was the name of the new physician who was going to examine
him.
A gradual improvement took place, and eighteen months after the
onset of the condition the cure was complete.
In the same connection Pitres refers to a case reported by Calvert
Holland.
A miner who had gone through the experience of incipient
suffocation found himself two months later irresistibly impelled to
exuberant speech. The rapidity and indistinctness of his
enunciation of words were very much in evidence, as well as a
tendency to stammering and to tautology. A further symptom
consisted in rotatory spasms of the head; but after five months a
satisfactory cure resulted.
We may cite a last instance from Ball:
A young girl was in the habit of kneeling down, making the sign of
the cross, and repeating "Jesus, Mary, Joseph." The performance was
limited to this order of events, but its practice in drawing-rooms
and still more in thoroughfares led to her being certified as
insane.
ECHOLALIA
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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