Abstracts of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung

Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies

Introduction
In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 1. 2nd ea., Princeton University Press, 1970. 260 p. (p. 3-17).

Certain conditions of psychopathic inferiority and altered states of consciousness, previously thought to be occult phenomena, are discussed to classify them and to resolve previous disagreement about them among scientific authorities. These include narcolepsy, lethargy, ambulatory automatism, periodic amnesia, somnambulism, and pathological lying, which are sometimes attributed to epilepsy, hysteria, or neurasthenia and sometimes described as diseases in themselves. The exceptional difficulty in defining these states is outlined and a case of somnambulism is presented to illustrate the problems of classification. A 40-year-old unmarried female, an accountant and bookkeeper in a large firm, had been in a highly nervous state for some time and took a vacation. While walking in a cemetery, she began to tear up flowers and scratch at the graves, remembering nothing of this later. In an asylum in Zürich she reported that she saw dead people in her room and her bed and heard voices calling from the cemetery. The conclusion was that the patient suffered from a psychopathic inferiority with a tendency to hysteria. In her state of nervous exhaustion, she had spells of epileptoid stupor. As a result of an unusually large dose of alcohol, the attacks developed into somnambulism with hallucinations, which attached themselves to fortuitous external perceptions in the same way as dreams. When she recovered from her nervous state, the hysteriform symptoms disappeared. Other cases of somnambulism and the findings of other researchers are briefly discussed. l 7 references.