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aid of a planchette, the varying liability to automatic movements among
normal individuals. Nearly one hundred students were submitted to
experiment. It was found that automatic responses could be obtained in two
sittings from all but a small proportion of the students of both sexes,
but that there were two types of individual who showed a special aptitude.
One type (probably showing the embryonic form of neurasthenia) was a
nervous, high-strung, imaginative type, not easily influenced from
without, and not so much suggestible as autosuggestible. The other type,
which is significant from our present point of view, is thus described by
Miss Stein: "In general the individuals, often blonde and pale, are
distinctly phlegmatic. If emotional, decidedly of the weakest, sentimental
order. They may be either large, healthy, rather heavy, and lacking in
vigor or they may be what we call anaemic and phlegmatic. Their power of
concentrated attention is very small. They describe themselves as never
being held by their work; they say that their minds wander easily; that
they work on after they are tired, and just keep pegging away. They are
very apt to have premonitory conversations, they anticipate the words of
their friends, they imagine whole conversations that afterward come true.
The feeling of having been there is very common with them; that is, they
feel under given circumstances that they have had that identical
experience before in all its details. They are often fatalistic in their
ideas. They indulge in day-dreams. As a rule, they are highly
There we have a picture of the physical constitution and psychic
temperament on which the classical symptoms of hysteria might easily be
built up. But these persons were ordinary students, and while a few
of their characteristics are what is commonly and vaguely called "morbid,"
on the whole they must be regarded as ordinarily healthy individuals. They
have the congenital constitution and predisposition on which some severe
psychic lesion at the "psychological moment" might develop the most
definite and obstinate symptoms of hysteria, but under favorable
circumstances they will be ordinary men and women, of no more than
ordinary abnormality or ordinary power. They are among the many who have
been called to hysteria at birth; they may never be among the few who are
We may have to recognize that on the side of the sexual emotions, as well
as in general constitution, a condition may be traced among normal persons
that is hysteroid in character, and serves as the healthy counterpart of a
condition which in hysteria is morbid. In women such a condition Has been
traced (though misnamed) by Dr. King.
Dr. King describes what he calls "sexual hysteria in women,"
which he considers a chief variety of hysteria. He adds, however,
that it is not strictly a disease, but simply an automatic
reaction of the reproductive system, which tends to become
abnormal under conditions of civilization, and to be perpetuated
in a morbid form. In this condition he finds twelve characters:
1. Time of life, usually between puberty and climacteric. 2.
Attacks rarely occur when subject is alone. 3. Subject appears
unconscious, but is not really so. 4. She is instinctively
ashamed afterward. 5. It occurs usually in single women, or in
those, single or married, whose sexual needs are unsatisfied. 6.
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