A Clinical Study of Some Mental Contents in Epileptic Attacks

It may be remembered that I mentioned in previous articles the interest and value of modern psychologic study of the so-called mental content of epilepsy. By such studies of the transitory deliria we gain a better understanding of the epileptic makeup and the manner in which the epileptic mishandles his emotional reactions to his environment. The plan also gives us insight as to the therapeutic and educational training that must be employed toward ridding the patient of his disease reactions and aiding him to more stable mental health. Our psychologic study and treatment of the epileptic grew out of a long, intimate association with epileptics and comparing their oral productions and behavior in transiory deliria and befogged mental states following petit mal with their mental conflicts of earlier life. The study was also given point and application by that which we have learned in psychoanalyzing dreams in neurotics and the spontaneous productions of drug, fever and psychogenic deliria in certain psychoses. Many have recorded the spontaneous productions of epileptic and psychotic deliriants and have pieced together these disjointed fragments to find if possible just what bearing they have upon the origin and trend of the nervous or mental disorder. Precise studies of this sort, however, are still in their infancy, and the data so far collected are hardly beyond the curious and bizarre. We find similar episodes depicted in the love story and novel, where the heroine meets with great emotional shock or disappoinment and preoccupies herself in a brain fever or delirium. In these pen-pictures the pent-up and unrequited soul desires of the heroine are brought out more or less at the behest of the unskilled novelist. If the hidden mental conflict may be thus easily obtained by such a method of “eavesdropping,” it may seem curious that those specially concerned in “ministering to the mind diseased or plucking from the heart a rooted sorrow” have not long ago solved the es