The psychology of dementia praecox Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The Emotional Complex And Its General Action On The Psyche. My theoretical propositions for an understanding of the psychology of dementia p... more »rascox are in reality almost entirely exhausted in the contents of the first chapter, for Freud in his works on hysteria, imperative neuroses and dreams has, after all, given all essentials. Nevertheless our ideas gained on an experimental basis differ somewhat from those of Freud. Perhaps my conception of the emotional complex even oversteps the limits of Freud's views. The essential basis of our personality is affectivity.1 Thought and action are only, as it were, symptoms of affectivity.2 The elements of our psychic life, sensations, ideas and emotions are given to consciousness in the form of certain entities, which can in a manner be compared to a molecule, if one may venture upon an analogy with chemistry. To illustrate: I meet on the street an old comrade and immediately an image is formed in my brain, it is a functional entity, the picture of my comrade X. We differentiate in this entity ("molecule") three components ("radicals"); sensory perceptions, intellectual components (ideas, memory pictures, judgments, etc.) and emotional tone.3 These three components are firmly united, so that if the memory picture alone of X comes to the surface the elements appertaining to it are regularly always with it. The sensory perception is represented by an accompanying centrifugal stimulation of the sensory spheres concerned. I am therefore justified in speaking here of a functional entity. 1 For feeling, mood, affect, and emotion, Bleuler proposes the expression " affectivity," which not only designates the affects in the proper sense but also the light feelings or feeling tones of pleasure and pain in every possible o...« less