elapse between the registration in memory of the initial incident and the secondary warnings, then, in accordance with the number of 'interim' memory registrations, the warning, when it does occur will not bring about a relative inattention for the original experience; the child will have a healthy disinclination to insert peas into his nose, but he will not develop an amnesia for the specific incident and a subsequent phobia is not likely to be built upon it. These non-hysterical phobias are essentially dependent upon memory and therefore fall into the mnemoneurotic group of the progressive neuroses. Their actual manifestation in behaviour would appear to be associated with an impairment of emotional control in adult life, an impairment which is increased by the consciousness of an inexplicable dread, which in turn is reinforced by the progressive diminution of the control. Throughout all the above argument it will be noticed that the factor of emotional control is constantly under discussion. It is to all intents and purposes absent in the infant; it is formed during childhood and is maintained and developed during adolescence and adult life; it disintegrates with the onset of the involutionary processes of old age. It is liable to diminution temporarily as a result of physical and psychical stress and strain at any time. As regards the neuroses, it may be imperfectly formed during childhood, and provided the defect be sufficiently great, clinical hysteria in early adult life may be manifested. Its formation may be defective as regards its reaction on the two groups of emotionalism; that is there may be a wrongful balance of control in relation to these two groups, and this carries with it the liability to neuroses of the progressive group in later life, especially if there be a general impairment resulting from the stresses and strains mentioned above. A marked defect in the formation of control in childhood admits the operation of psychical dissociation and hysterical behaviour; a less severe defect results in behaviour, not in itself hysterical in that psychical dissociation is absent, but conforming superficially to such behaviour. Therefore in the secondary impairment of emotional control which is associated with the progressive neuroses there may be in the course of time behaviour which has certain points of resemblance to hysteria, but which is not hysterical in that it is not dependent upon psychical dissociation. Needless to say, the severe loss of control that is sometimes met with in the involutionary phases of life can never give rise to hysterical behaviour owing to the organic lesions which underlie it. A degree of emotional control which is less than that which is the average for the community in which the individual lives may for convenience be called 'hyperthymia,' and the hyperthymic state is therefore of all degrees of intensity. Hyperthymia may be primary or secondary; an intense primary hyperthymia constitutes the base of hysteria. A less intense primary hyperthymia leads to an undue emotional reaction to the surroundings combined with behaviour otherwise normal. Such people are commonly labelled 'hysterical' in general practice. Secondary hyperthymia may result from different physical stresses and strains and may also supervene on the course of any of the progressive neuroses. In the latter case there is a risk of the essential progressiveness of the disorder being masked by these secondary hysteria-like behaviour manifestations and in some cases the symptomatology may be complex. Hysteria being a condition dependent upon defective education in the broad sense of the word is a condition which may reasonably be expected to disappear with an increase in knowledge of dealing with the developing child, though of course all of us will show traces for all time of its underlying mechanism in that all of us are born emotionally uncontrolled. But such traces will be confined to the sphere of the formation of useful habits and will not be found as clinical symptoms. On the other hand, the elimination of the progressive neuroses would appear to be a very much more difficult problem for the future, for it would seem to necessitate an elimination of the factors of worry and dread from everyday life, and in the present state of society it is difficult to see how this may be brought about. At the same time the trend of modern civilisation and enlightened thought is in this direction, and it is not only possible but probable that in the ultimate future these factors may be so greatly lessened as to become, to all intents and purposes, inoperative. To summarise, we may say then that from the standpoint of clinical medicine emotionalism falls into two groups, centripetal and centrifugal respectively, and that the recognition of this duality is of utility in the classification of functional nervous disorders. It is of equal importance to realise that in the formation of such disorders emotional control would appear to play the most important role, and that abnormality of such control is an essential associate of these conditions. Functional nervous disorders would appear to arise out of an abnormal relationship between the emotionalism of an individual and his control; abnormal as considered in the light of the average for the community in which he is born and develops. Defective formation of emotional control in the first few years of life, if sufficient in degree, conduces to hysteria in adolescence and to the perpetuation of certain symptoms as habitual action in later life in the event of the hysterical symptoms not receiving proper treatment. Hysteria therefore is a regressive condition. A defective balance of control between the two groups of emotionalism is associated with functional disorders of the progressive order; the defect may consist of an overstraining of centrifugal control or an overdevelopment of a centripetal; the results in each case are clinically recognisable though in civil life the degree of invalidation may not be very great. The occurrence of dread, independently or in the course of the above abnormal states, will, if it be allowed to persist, bring about definite and increasing invalidism. Prominent symptoms of such invalidism are pain and a rising blood-pressure, and this phase ultimately ends in organic disease through the supervention of vascular involutionary changes. In the event of the emotional control being badly treated during childhood, in the direction of overdevelopment and overstrain, the elements of an obsessive neurosis in later life may be implanted through the possible mechanism of "amnesia by relative inattention," a neurosis which also in the course of time is liable to pass into the organic stage through the occurrence of dread. These latter types of disorders, in that they depend upon the presence of emotional control and pictorial' memory, must be looked upon as exclusively human and therefore as being progressive. The above conclusions have been arrived at as a result of clinical observation; it is therefore of considerable interest to find that Professor Jastrow writing on "The Neurological Concept of Behaviour," has come to similar conclusions on a purely psychological basis. 1 Psychological Review, vol. xxxi, No. 3. FRANCIS THOMPSON: A PSYCHO ANALYTICAL STUDY1 BY ELLA FREEMAN SHARPE. I. FRANCIS THOMPSON can, I suppose, be justly called the greatest religious poet of the nineteenth century. He surmised for himself an immortality through his verse, a surmise likely to be fulfilled. There are poets whose universality of expression is like great orchestral music which includes the individual instruments with their individual and peculiar music within the whole. There are poets who are masters of an individual instrument. To find Thompson is to be arrested as it were by a single experience, a few poignant cadences that are manipulated in different keys with an ever increasing complexity and astonishing beauty. With the true poet's intuition he can direct us to the scene of his poignant experience the Eden of infancy which he never relinquished. (A) Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod I sure shall keep a younger company: Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:- In speaking of Shelley, Thompson has given us what one feels from the standpoint of psycho-analysis to be the sine qua non of poetic genius. He says Shelley had An instinctive perception (immense in range and fertility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the underlying analogies, the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul...the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things. He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and invisible....He could express as he listed the material and the immaterial in terms of each other. It is that direct spontaneous transcript of the unconscious experience into perfectly analogous expression that makes the poet, and in the case of Francis Thompson gives us so clear a picture of whence he drew his inspiration. Nor do I know elsewhere from a poet's lips anything so psycho-analytically accurate as this poet's swift intuition respecting the poet's nature. He says of Shelley: "He retained the idiosyncrasy of childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last he was the enchanted child." The phrase "without differentiation" 1 Read at a Meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society held on 18th April 1923. touches one of the fundamental characteristics of the sources of Francis Thompson's own imagination. We shall not do violence to Thompson's majestic verse in interpreting in the light of psycho-analysis those subtle analogies with which his work abounds, finding therein some way to the heart of his mystery. The exposition of that mystery in authentic poetry brought him for all too brief a period into an articulate relationship with his fellows. Nor shall we do violence to the man in interpreting those same analogies, for unexpressed, they made of him "an enfant perdu," "an alien guest,' unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth." For of himself might be written his own words on Coleridge: Over that wreck most piteous and terrible...shine, and will shine...those...resplendent poems for which he paid the devil's price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers. II. Francis Thompson was born in 1858 or 1859. He never knew which and said he did not care. His birthplace was Preston and he remembered his mother taking him to see the house in which he was born. It seemed to him "disappointingly like any other house." Thompson's father was a general practitioner and, like his wife, sister and brothers, a convert to Roman Catholicism. His rounds were his diocese and he was remembered after death for many unostentatious offices of kindness. Two of his brothers, Francis Thompson's uncles, were writers of uninspired verse. Mary Morton, the mother of Francis Thompson, was a convert to Roman Catholicism and it seems probable that an estrangement because of this caused her to leave home to earn her livelihood. She failed to enter the novitiate, an experience repeated in her son's life. A cousin says that Francis Thompson inherited his passion for religion from his father, but the poet himself considered he inherited his mental and physical traits from his mother. Certain traits are interesting because of their perpetuation in diverse members of a very scattered family. One relative's life was a tragedy because she failed to enter a convent. Two aunts lived and died as nuns. Francis Thompson's own niece is in a Canadian Community. One relative recited the Psalms in a loud voice in the streets of his town while sleep-walking. The aloofness and disregard of worldly prosperity so marked in Francis Thompson himself, are characteristics to be found in the scattered branches of the family. Francis Thompson was the second son, the first dying in earliest |