You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Gottschalk treated by intensive psychotherapy three children with idiopathic epilepsy. The patients were boys aged five, ten, and seventeen, one of whom was treated three or four times a week, the other two once a week, each for a total of more than one hundred therapeutic sessions. In all three cases psychological and emotional factors could be correlated with the epileptic attacks. Frequency and form of the seizures were beneficially influenced by the psychotherapy. Evidences of improvement were clinical improvement, favorable electroencephalographic findings, and improved results of psychological tests. The author acknowledges that it is hard to control such studies and that mere passage of time might have produced improvement.
It was difficult to discover any single specific conflict that is a constant precipitant of epileptic seizures. What appeared to initiate the chain of events leading to the attacks was blocking of any drive or strong emotion from gratification or expression. These patients both neurophysiologically and psychologically had a low threshold for seizures and a predisposition to paroxysmal and explosive activity. Their impulses and emotions were more primitive and less mature than those of other children of comparable age. In two of the three children, seizures have not recurred now for a period of two years. Without treatment, the probability of two or more two-year remissions in three patients is approximately one in ten.