PROTOPATHIC-INSTINCTIVE PHENOMENA IN NORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL MALAY LIFE.

By F. H. G. VAN LOON.

It is a generally accepted and also experimentally proved fact, that a negro or other primitive person, brought over to a Western or Northern civilized country and surroundings, physically will remain a negro, and that the descendants of a negro couple, at least during many generations, will remain black, long-legged, thick-lipped and curly-haired. In other words, we all know that a negro, Australian native, a Chinese, or a Malay has certain well-defined and distinct physical qualities, which remain constant under changed conditions and so distinguish them one from the other and all from the white Indo-European races.

It is also generally accepted that the various races, and especially the primitive ones, show psychical characteristics which as well as the physical ones can not be ascribed only to climate, food, sicknesses and the like factors, but also are real racial inherited qualities, as constant as their colour or the shape of their skulls.

Similarly many facts can be indicated, which (as in the case of the world-spread Jews) seem to prove a great degree of constancy of certain racial qualities during many generations under quite different circumstances; but as soon as one is asked to give a scientific proof, even that a negro has other psychical qualities, or characteristics, or tendencies, than an Englishman or a Dutchman, the problem proves excessively difficult, and when one is asked to prove a difference in the possibilities of evolution, even between an Australian native and a white man, it becomes evident that scientific study up till now has given very little definite results in regard to these problems of racial psychological and hereditary qualities.

It is in this matter as in many others: the truth, the facts, the principles generally accepted and intuitively and unconsciously approved of, turn out to raise difficult problems, as soon as modern study with its scientific methods and demands replaces the old belief in 'authority,' 'general opinion' and 'established facts.'

The first result of modern methods of study is often the breaking down of cherished tales; the second, that in many circles the opposite of

the old theories is accepted as lightheartedly, only because science could not prove the old 'axioms.'

Especially in the present day this inclination, which ultimately makes of every fact a fiction, all knowledge a supposition, may be observed; and if we see it even in simpler physical problems, how far stronger its influence and how much easier its results must be in our psychical ones— where indeed Science finds the greatest difficulties in avoiding faults and establishing facts. Now psychology is a new branch of science: it has not yet formed many generally accepted theories and has gathered relatively few 'certain facts'; but it has nowadays another great drawback-the sudden and general interest, namely, of half the world who want to apply the results, or even the hypotheses, of psychology to all sorts of practical ends-to solve social, economical, sexual and political problems at once by the help of scientific psychological data—and who forget that psychology has only just begun to study those mental factors which are at the bottom of most human problems.

This, I think, is the main reason why it should now be popular to maintain that after all there is very little real difference between the psychical capacities of various races, that environment counts for nearly everything and that very little is genuinely inherited. This also is why such a view is often supported by the argument that it is impossible to produce scientific evidence to the contrary.

Let us consider why it is often very difficult to demonstrate any psychical difference between individuals of distinct races.

In my opinion this is chiefly because attention has been mainly concentrated upon intellectual aptitudes. For certainly the main racial differences are not those which belong to the 'upper levels' of the human mind. They must be sought and can be found in its basic foundations, in the deeply rooted vital and instinctive tendencies and those connected with them.

So far as the conscious guidance of instinctive impulses go, all men no doubt tend to react in similar ways. If therefore we are to look for basic instinctive differences we ought to seek our evidence not in normal but in abnormal behaviour, where the ordinary intellect-guided conduct of man has been substituted by confusion, hallucination and insanity, or has at least been weakened by strong instinctive trends and affects. For this evidence we must turn to a study of the mob, and especially of individuals or groups in whom intellectual control still is relatively weak, as primitives and children.

Thus the best method is the comparative study of the psychical Med. Psych. vIII

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abnormalities of forms of insanity special to certain races, or of special symptoms and phenomena which may be observed in all kinds of psychoses.

Further, instead of losing ourselves in detailed and theoretical study directed upon our own highly complicated psychical phenomena, it may be easier to investigate the symptoms and mental aberrations which have arisen on different soil in forms of mental development probably less complicated.

I have had an opportunity to study the Malays and their very interesting psychical reactions during more than ten years of intimate contact with nearly all the representatives of these fifty millions of yellowish- and dark-brown natives of the Dutch East Indies, amongst whom Amuck and Latah are the two best-known forms of insanity.

I shall not try to give you a romantic picture of Amuck and Latahit is sufficient to describe briefly their main phenomena. Amuck is the absolutely sudden and unexpected murderous attack of the Malay man, who, without any known reason, suddenly jumps up, seizes his keris or another well-sharpened weapon, if he is a soldier, his gun or his bayonet, and attacks, wounds, or kills anybody who happens to stand in his way, till the Amuck-runner himself generally is 'laid low.'

Now I found at Batavia, in several cases of Amuck, that very often these murderous Amuck-runners were suffering from infectious diseasesmalaria often, pneumonia, acute syphilis, typhoid, etc., and that often a good dose of quinine cured the man both of his malaria and of his confusion. For Amuck is a sudden state of hallucinatory confusion in which the patient tries to fly from a menacing danger. The danger is often a tiger, the most feared animal, whose name the Malay even does not dare to pronounce. Or it may be an enemy armed with a keris. The instinctive reaction to this danger is the flight and the attack, blind and unlimited. The patient kills his own family and flees till exhausted or till his fear and terror have died out.

We may admit that here, if ever, we have an example of pure instinctive reaction to danger-where agony and terror are leading to a certain form of reaction not quite unknown to us under totally different circumstances.

Now Amuck is not confined to the Malay races. I know of several cases of homicide, even in Great Britain, which seem to be identical with the Malay Amuck. For instance, an English soldier, who had malarial attacks in Macedonia during the war, several months afterwards in his own country suddenly 'went mad,' seized a weapon and in his flight wounded several people. He also, like the Malay, remembered very little

or nothing of what had happened. Sometimes the patient remembers later that he saw the tiger or the man menacing his life. This is a kind. of last and vague memory. After that he is, as the Malay says, mata gelap (black before the eyes). It is certain that a man under these conditions sees and hears very badly-that often his normal sensory functions have been entirely eliminated by the strong emotion. We ourselves have phrases such as 'blind rage,' or as voir rouge.

However, the European seldom runs Amuck, although he may get fever or be confused. He is in fact so far different from the Malay that he has suppressed this instinctive way of reacting, when threatened by danger to life; and, at least in favourable circumstances, he reacts in a more efficient manner. Instinct plays a less important part and experience and intellectual control a far greater one.

It can be said that, not only in Amuck and Latah, but also in other psychical phenomena of normal life, in the malu feeling (unbearable shame and embarrassment, especially when made ridiculous in public), in mata gelap (blind rage) and in the binggung reaction (losing one's head), etc., the Malay shows the same characteristic weakness, a lack of resistance against sudden emotion. Especially strong affects of a primitive, instinctive type (anxiety, fright, terror, rage, sexual jealousy) are apt to overcome all intellectual brakes and flood the whole of consciousnessas is very clear in the frequent Amuck syndrome, and as we also see in Latah.

In Latah a sudden fright or other strong emotion causes the Malay woman, mostly of an average or elderly age, to enter into a curious state of hyper-imitativity, in which she loses all self-control and imitates immediately and most precisely what is done before her or said to her. All normal control of actions and reactions is swept away by the sudden emotion and she becomes the puppet of the child or grown-up who may amuse himself with the poor old lady by making her throw all her dishes on the ground, or even strike an honoured guest-in compulsory imitation of what is done before her.

Generally, after being frightened, the Latah woman utters or shouts a few mostly highly erotic words or wishes normally totally repressed and hidden, or abusive language, even about her own mistress or master.

An enquiry amongst the physicians of the Dutch East Indies showed the remarkable fact that Latah practically is seen only with Malay women (only in 1 per cent. of the cases with men); a few cases also were known amongst Indo-European and Indo-Chinese women. Like Amuck it was never seen with pur sang Europeans.

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A second interesting point was that Latah in by far the greatest percentage (5 per cent.) occurs with those women who are or have been servants (kokkie cook, babu maid, etc.) with white masters, or who have been at least during a long period of their life in a subordinate position: who are accustomed to obey orders without any criticism, often without any thought, who are leading indeed a sort of automatic humdrum life.

There is one other special feature of Latah to which I will now refer briefly. Many of these old women declare that their Latah symptoms began in their youth, generally after their marriage, when they had had one or more very 'dirty' dreams-of having e.g. been attacked by male organs, which from all sides approached them-so that they awoke with a scream, shivering and perspiring for fear. This type of dream most obviously belongs to the (scarcely repressed or hidden by symbolism, etc.) wish-dream and seems to point to a sexual conflict, which with the native men is scarcely to be expected!

In this Latah syndrome we again see the overwhelming of the whole consciousness by a sudden fright-followed by a state of mind in which the whole behaviour, the feeling and the reaction, seems to be subordinate to the person who made the patient Latah.

It is interesting to remark that these pathological conditions are in absolute harmony with those appearing daily in normal life, where we find the same group of psychical characteristics. In malu, binggung and in mata gelap, for instance, we also see a high degree of emotional irritability, a relatively weak resistance to sudden emotion (fear, fright, etc.). In Latah we further notice a very high degree of suggestibility and imitativity, and this is also seen in daily life; the Malay very easily takes over new opinions, fashions, or beliefs; whilst his strong emotionalism causes him to be rather hedonistic, in avoiding all susah (trouble) which might disturb his equanimity.

However, this harmony between normal and pathological phenomena, though it is interesting, does not explain sufficiently why they do occur in this special form, with such a strikingly similar progress in all

cases.

In this connection it is of great interest to remark that Amuck and Latah are seen only in the Malays (and some other primitives), but we must not forget that we may see related phenomena in civilized peoples and races-not individually, but more especially in the group, in the crowd and in the mob.

In a panic, for example, we see the crowd reacting in the same way