and to the personality as a whole. This is
an ambitious task and we do not pretend to any great achievement, merely
to a beginning.

No better psychoses could be chosen for a preliminary effort than benign
stupors. Every psychiatrist has seen them, although they are wrongly
diagnosed as a rule, and they play no small role in the world's history.
Euripides represents Orestes as having a stupor which is pictured as
accurately as any modern psychiatrist could describe an actual case.[1]
St. Paul is chronicled as falling to the ground, being thereafter blind
and going without food or drink for three days. While apparently
unconscious he had a religious vision. St. Catherine of Siena had
several unquestionable stupors, which are fairly well described. In
fact the mystics in general seem to have had communion with God and the
saints most often when they seemed unconscious to bystanders.[2] The
obsession with death, which seems so intimate a part of the stupor
reaction, is a fundamental theme in poetry, religion and philosophy. The
psychology of this interest is, speaking broadly, the psychology of
stupor. So, from a general standpoint, our problem is related to the
study of one of the most potent ideas which move the soul of man.

Psychiatrically, stupors have long remained an unsolved riddle. In the
century prior to 1872 (See the digest of Dagonet's publication in
Chapter XV) French psychiatrists wrote some good descriptions of stupor
and offered brilliant, though sketchy generalizations about the
condition. Two years later an English psychiatrist (Newington, See
Chapter XV) improved on the French work. Little light has been thrown on
the subject since then. The researches of the later French School showed
that stupor often occurs in the course of major hysteria, but this left
many of these episodes obviously not hysterical. When serious attempts
were made at classification, this ubiquitous symptom complex was hard to
handle. Wernicke wisely refrained from attempting more than a loose
descriptive grouping. He called all conditions with marked inactivity
and apathy "akinetic psychoses" and said that some recovered, some did
not. Taxonomic zeal began to blind vision when Kahlbaum formulated his
"Catatonia" and included stupor in the symptom complex. The condition
which we call stupor occurs in the course of many different types of
mental disease. It is true that it is frequent in catatonia but is not
exclusively there. Mongol