Oculogyric Crises

In this article I shall focus attention on the thought of the activity of the "organism as a whole," which White and I before and since the first edition of our textbook (1915) have been insisting on if an all round understanding of sick behavior is to be gained; I shall also call attention to the fruitfulness of the conceptions of Freud for psychopathology in other fields than the psychoneuroses, here applied specifically to the positive symptoms (Jackson)—Gestalt (Wertheimer, Goldstein), emergents (Morgan)—of the compulsive phenomena seen in the postencephalitic oculogyric crises. I make the preliminary statement that irreversible structural changes undoubtedly take place in the central nervous system in epidemic encephalitis. In the language of current pathology, there is an organic disease, although the emphasis on organic after all may mean very little.4 In other words, the machine, "as a whole," is interfered with in its adaptive capacity to reality.