Conversion Epilepsy

The wish to realize a finality, in the diagnostic disposition of human ailments, has always been an expression of the universal tendency of the human mind to systematize its knowledge. The ease of rationalizing, by the logic of analogy, leads to the grouping of like with like. Apparently similar masses of phenomena are labeled and docketed and made identical by force of thought. Once catalogued, tradition supports conviction, and conclusions become premise facts for succeeding thinkers, and review is abolished.

No class of symptom data has been subjected to this process of categorical molding in greater degree than those convulsive phenomena and consciousness defects which go to form the concept of epilepsy.

Whatever may form the central core of this massed phenomena is not yet evident, but psychoanalytic approach has begun to split off a portion of this mass, and to appropriate it to itself as properly belonging to the general concept of a neurosis. Certain epilepsies conform to all the criteria of the neuroses and respond to the analytic therapeusis of a neurosis with equal success. For purpose of identification these neuroses may facilely be ticketed conversion epilepsies.

Such a case of “conversion epilepsy” because of its resemblance to the accepted idea of an idiopathic and incurable convulsive condition, because of its mistaken identity from the viewpoint of treatment for a period of fifteen years, and because of its relief by analytic procedure in the course of six months, and the maintenance of freedom from convulsion during a succeeding two years, and at the present time—such a case seems appropriate for use in illustrating certain of the mechanisms of the neurosis as formulated by the new school of American Psychopathology.

Although the convulsive seizure dominates the picture of an epilepsy, yet the intrinsic reaction which is the fundamental fact is a defect in consciousness. “Disturbances of consciousness of the general nature of assumptions of less clear