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In order to forestall possible misunderstanding, I wish to remark explicitly that I do not imagine that I have discovered the innermost nature of the processes of recovery in dementia præcox or even that I have come upon the track of its primary disease manifestations.
Also therapy will be little advanced by observations such as the following, but they may furnish a few points valuable from a prognostic standpoint.
We conclude that mental disease is present in an individual, when his expressions and acts stand in contradiction to his actual surroundings as known to us, to his true social position, and to his former personality and cannot be explained from what would logically be assumed to be his content of consciousness.
If we are able to analyze the expressions which appear to us as morbid, only exceptionally do they unfold themselves as sufficiently motived reactions to dreamy, symbolized, wish-fulfilments, which latter however often present themselves without the slightest symbol-disguise and take on for the patient just as real as a character as the objective external world.
The outbreak of the disease can be tersely characterized as the eruption of the subconscious into the conscious.
Toward this happening, the patients conduct themselves very differently, according to whether the beginning is sudden or gradual, according to age, and also according to individual psychic constitution.
The manifest disease symptoms are however never anything else but the reaction of the patients to the new situation. If they act and think, ignoring the real external world, entirely in the sense of the imaginary wish-fulfilment, they appear objectively confused. Others, confronted by the contradiction between the unreal imagined