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In wishing to prove that it is one of the greatest errors to wish to explain psychiatric symptoms psychologically, Nissl1 gives, among other examples, the following: “Although the general paretic apparently may offer the same pictures as those we observe in hysteria, in manic-depressive psychoses, or in paranoia, and so on, and although all symptoms, under certain circumstances, may disappear, also in the paretic, without leaving traces, nothing is known to me of psychological explanations. Here one accepts the same thing over which one is completely puzzled in other diseases, as something self-evident and necessary, which is founded in the very nature of the paretic process.” Nissl is right—not as regards representing all psychic phenomena of the paretic as self-evident, but in his contention that up to this time, hardly anyone has ventured to advance psychological analysis of the psychotic symptoms of general paresis.
Even the otherwise courageous Kretschmer in his psychopathological investigation and its relation to present clinical psychiatry1a scarcely dares “to shake so firmly established a clinical picture as