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The careful analyses pf a large number of psychotics, including individuals of both sexes, of every educational level and of many nationalities, have consistently shown that the most important etiological determinants of psychogenic psychoses, considered in a broad sense, are invariably sexual. Of such cases received at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a large proportion of men and women show a striking similarity in their biological constitution, and their psychoses show a definite conformity in certain psychopathological principles. Particularly is this true of many young men received from the army and navy. The cases referred to are at present classified as dementia praecox types, to which group, as deteriorating personalities, they characteristically belong.
The psychopathological mechanisms involved in these cases and their relation to the psychoses will be discussed in another paper. The two important principles that seem to underlie each case are (1) that the individual is the host of well-developed motives, generated at the phylogenetic level, to perform certain sexual acts which he is unable to dissociate or in many instances to even control without (2) intensively developing another series of motives (at the habit level) which seem to functionate at the levels of the personality