DOSTOEVSKI AND PARRICIDE
533
psychic stimuli. However characteristic intellectual impairment may
be of the overwhelming majority of cases, at least one case is known
in which the affiiction did not interfere with the functioning of the
highest intellectual facuities (Helmholtz) . (Other cases of which the
same fact is alleged are either uncertain or open to the same objec–
tions as thac of Dostoevski
himse~.
). Patients who are victims of
epilepsy may give an impression of dullness and arrested develop–
ment, just ac; the disease is frequently accompanied by the most pal–
pable idiocy and the most serious mental defects, even although these
are not a necessary element of the clinical picture. These seizures,
however, with all their variations,
also
occur in persons who show
complete mental development, and who, previous to their onset,
possess an excessive, generally imperfectly controlled affectivity. It is
no wonder in these circumstances that it has been found impossible
to determine a single clinical entity, "epilepsy." The similarity of
the external symptoms seems to demand a functional conception, as
if the mechanism of the abnormal impulsive discharge were organic–
ally prepared in
adv~nce,
to be called upon in quite different condi–
tions, both during disturbances of the cerebral activity due to serious
histolytic and toxic affections, and also in case of inadequate control
of the psychic economy, the action of the energy working in the soul
in a crisis. But behind the division we glimpse the identity of the fun–
damental mechanism of the impulsive outlet. The same thing must
to some extent apply to sexual processes: the earliest doctors called
the
coitus
a little epilepsy, that is, they recognised
in
the sexual act
a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic irritation outlet.
T he "epileptic reaction," as this common element may be called,
witbout doubt also places itself at the disposal of the neurosis, the
esseuce of which is to get rid, by somatic means, of masses of stimuli
which it cannot deal with psychically. The epileptic seizure is thus
a symptom of hysteria; and is adapted and modified by it, as is also
done by the normal sexual discharge. It is, therefore, quite right to
dist:ituguish between organic and "affective" epilepsy. The practical
sigrnucance of this is that .the person who suffers from the one kind
is rm:ntally disordered, and the person who suffers from the other, a
neurotic. In the first case, the psychic life is subject to an alien dis–
turi{mnce from without; in the second, the disturbance is an expression
of t.ite psychic life itself.
It is extremely probable that Dostoevski's epilepsy was of tnc
second kind. This cannot, strictly speaking, be proved; to do that one
would have to be able to
fix
the first appearance of the epilepsy anu
the subsequent fluctuations of the attacks in the continuity of hiS
