Clinical Psychiatry

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: terized by flight of ideas with its tendency to external and verbal associations. The abrupt development of many different ideas without order, and not leading to any definite goal idea, gives rise to the desultory confusion. There may also be differentiated still another form of confusion, dreamy...
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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: terized by flight of ideas with its tendency to external and verbal associations. The abrupt development of many different ideas without order, and not leading to any definite goal idea, gives rise to the desultory confusion. There may also be differentiated still another form of confusion, dreamy confusion, which is characteristic of delirious states. In this type there exists besides the disturbance of apprehension and the rapid fading away of the perceptions, a marked prominence of sensory elements in thought. There is also a combined form of confusion, in which there is a transitory appearance of abundant, new trains of thought following each other incoherently. The head fairly swims because there is not an opportunity to marshal or survey the rapidly appearing ideas. This type of confusion characterizes those forms of mental disease in which the rapidly appearing thoughts are elaborated into a permanent delusion formation, in the same way that in normal life a person gradually works into his train of thought a new idea that at first was confused. Also the presence of many hallucinations may be regarded as a cause of an hallucinatory confusion, just as a normal person sometimes loses his orientation if he is suddenly placed in an inextricable environment with new and puzzling impressions. Mental retardation can also produce a form of confusion of thought, through the slowing of the process of comprehension and mental elaboration. This has been designated stuporous confusion. In it one sometimes encounters a combination with a genuine flight of ideas. Finally the emotional attitude may play a very important r61e in the development of different forms of confusion of thought. In some diseased mental states with marked disturbances of the emotions, this element is of great impo...