HYSTERICAL ANESTHESIA, ANALGESIA AND ASTEREOGNOSIS

Abstract

It is unfortunate that with the realization of the psychic causation of hysterical symptoms there has been a widespread neglect of the study of these phenomena from the physiologic standpoint. Psychoanalysts, in their elaborations of the psychologic mechanisms involved in the production of conversion symptoms, have not questioned seriously the means by which the nervous system is able to build these sudden physiologic manifestations of psychopathologic processes. The existence of the question has not been entirely ignored,¹but with the exception of Hurst,²who reported a number of excellent experiments on the frequency and extent of special sense disorders in the war neuroses, there is an astonishing paucity of experimental data bearing on the problem. That this paucity has been a result of a lack of adequate methodologic approach seems possible. However, within the last decade technics have been developed which should prove fruitful if employed in this