The Feeling of Stupidity1

The feeling of stupidity, like other symptoms which can become the predominant complaint in mental disorder, has been experienced from time to time by most people. It may become disturbing to patients either through the frequency of its occurrence or its intensity. As the symptom is concerned with the process of thinking it is not surprising that it should be encountered as the major difficulty in persons suffering from varying degrees of depersonalization. In such patients erotization of thinking, a process involving the value of intelligence, seems to be a determining factor.

Kinship in a disproportionate investment of libido in both intellectual precocity and the feeling of stupidity (psychogenic stupidity) has been noted. In the former excessive libido is attached to the processes of thinking, in the latter it appears to be mobilized for the construction and preservation of a barrier against the entrance and (or) exit of ideas. The stimulus which seems to determine the libidinal mobilization in two such apparently opposite directions lies in the choice of the identification (super-ego formation) of the individual with the intellectual attributes (stupidity or intelligence) of one of his parents.

The unconscious object and ultimate result of these apparently antithetic manifestations are similar; each tends to relieve the individual from the more real exigencies of life through protective identification with a favoured parent. In erotization of thought there is too great an expenditure of libido in study or abstraction. In the feeling of stupidity too much libido is invested in deflecting stimuli which could induce certain disapproved thoughts which in turn might provoke the person to real action. When either erotization of thought or feelings of stupidity become sufficiently frequent or active, their cumulative effect may cause a cessation of mental productivity (a sort of mental stasis) which the patient describes as a blank or a feeling of unreality.