at once of the vanishing of dreams on waking, with its
reestablishment of extroverted consciousness. This registration of
impressions requires interest and active attention. Without interest
there is no attention and no registration. The patient in stupor
presents just the memory defect which we would expect. Indifference to
his environment leads to a poor memory of external events, while on
recovery there may be such a divorce between consciousness of normal and
abnormal states that the past delusions are wiped from the record of
conscious memory. Withdrawal of energy then produces not only inactivity
and apathy but grave defects in intellectual capacity.

The natural flow of interest in regression is to earlier types of
ambition and activity. This is betrayed not merely by the thought
content dealing with the youth and childhood of the patient, but also is
manifested in behavior. Excluding involution melancholia there is
probably no psychosis in which the patients exhibit such infantile
reactions as in stupor. Except for the stature and obvious age of these
patients, one could easily imagine that he was dealing with a spoiled
and fractious infant. One thinks at once of the negativism which is so
like that of a perverse child and of the unconventional, personal habits
to which these patients cling so stubbornly. Masturbation, for instance,
is quite frequent, while willful wetting and soiling is still more
common. We sometimes meet with childishness, both in vocabulary and mode
of expression. In one case there was evidently a delusion of a return to
actual childhood, for she kept insisting that she was "in papa's house."

The frequency with which the delusion of mutual death occurs in stupor
is another evidence of its regressive psychology. The partner in the
spiritual marriage is rarely, if ever, the natural object of adult
affection, but rather a parent or other relative to whose memory the
patient has unconsciously clung for many years, reawakening in the
psychosis an ambition of childhood for an exclusive possession that
reaches its fulfillment in this delusion. Closely allied with this is
another delusion, that of being actually dead, which the patients
sometimes express in action, even when not in words. The anesthesia to
pin pricks, the immobility and the refusal to recognize the existence of
the world around, in patients who give evidence of some intellectual
operations still persisting, are probably all part of