The neuropsychoses or psychoneuroses simulate all forms of mental disease, beginning with melancholia and mania, and ending with general paresis and dementia.
Psychoneurosis and somatopsychosis are diseases of the subconscious; in the former mental, in the latter physical symptoms predominate.
Psychopathic states should be rigidly differentiated from other disturbances, such as neuropathies and organopathies, or necropathies. The following diagram may be of help:
Nervous and Mental Diseases
DIAGRAM I
[CHAPTER VIII]
FEAR AND THE HYPNOIDAL STATE
In my work on “Sleep” I report a series of interesting experiments carried out by me on guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, children, and adults.[4] I discovered one of the most important states of animal life, a state which I termed hypnoidal.
The study shows that in almost every animal, from the lowest to the highest, from frog to man, a somewhat sudden change of the usual environment deprives that animal of its activities and its functions. If the change is not too intense and prolonged, the animal merges into the hypnoidal state in which the lost functions are restored. During this hypnoidal state the functions are weakened, the animal may be regarded in a state of invalidism, its reactions being enfeebled, practically speaking, paretic.