The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. xv, Nos. 2 and 3. This double number opens with an important article, by Dr Morton Prince, on "Miss Beauchamp: The Theory of the Psychogenesis of Multiple Personality." This study, he tells us, consists of condensed chapters from a volume, planned as a larger study of the problem of human personality, whose publication was deferred owing to the outbreak of the war. The present paper, which deserves fuller consideration than can be given in these Notes, deals with the psychogenesis of Sally, B I and B IV. A paper on "Four cases of 'Regression' in Soldiers" is contributed by W. McDougall. In these four cases the dominant feature was a regression to early childhood. Their behaviour afforded evidence of a re-animation of infantile modes of functioning which had been superseded and apparently lost or suppressed in the course of growing up from infancy. Dr McDougall compares this outcropping of infantile modes of functioning after severe 'shell-shock' to the new outburst of growth and vital activity which takes place in the older and more primitive parts of a tree when the most recently formed parts are injured or destroyed. He therefore regards "regression" as a biological rather than a psychological process. "Resolution of a Skin Phobia with Nightmare: A Case of Mental Readjustment in Dreams without Conscious Catharsis" is the title of a paper by Lydiard H. Horton in which he illustrates the use of his "inventorial technique" in the interpretation of dreams. "The dreamer was led to adjust her own mental disharmony through 'dreaming it out...After two months a 'resolution' dream came which completely eliminated the phobia and the nightmare....The subject gained relief without acquiring that insight into her own complexes which usually is considered necessary." Alfred Gordon writes on "Illusion of "The Already Seen' (Paramnesia) and of "The Never Seen' (Agnosia)," and gives short notes of seven cases in which one of these illusions was present. He does not consider such disturbance of 'recognition' by itself to be pathognomonic of a fundamental psychic alteration in the personality since it may occur in normal states of health. Several factors may be concerned in the production of non-recognition. The most satisfactory interpretation is that which ascribes the illusions to disturbances of the organised motor reactions on which, according to Bergson, the sense of 'familiarity' is based. T. W. M. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. B. PEACE, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. |