[225] Centralblatt für Nervenheilkunde, April 1886. In some forms of insanity the false recognition of a person may become a fixed delusion. This question has been studied by Albès in his Paris thesis, De I'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, 1906.
[226] E. Maitland, Anna Kingsford, vol. i. p. 3. Lalande (Revue Philosophique, November 1893, p. 487) gives a precisely similar case in a child.
[227] As quoted by Jastrow, The Subconscious, p. 248.
[228] Leroy, Etude sur l'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, 1898, with forty-nine new observations. Leroy states, however (in declared opposition to my view), that only a minority of his cases actually mention fatigue.
[229] Heymans, 'Eine Enquête über Depersonnalisation und Fausse Reconnaissance,' Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, November, 1903; also a further paper in the same journal confirming his conclusions, January 1906.
[230] Féré, 'Deuxième Note sur la Fausse Reconnaissance,' Journal de Neurologie, 1905.
[231] Dromard et Albès, 'L'Illusion dit de Fausse Reconnaissance,' Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, May-June 1905.
[232] Dugas, 'Observations sur des Erreurs "Formelles" de la Mémoire,' Revue Philosophique, July 1908.
[233] A friend, liable to this form of paramnesia, wrote to me after the publication of my first paper on the subject: 'I find, as you foretold, that it is difficult to recall an experience of this kind in all its details. I feel sure, however, that it is not necessarily allied with an enfeebled or overwrought nervous system. It was commonest with me in my youth, at a time when my life was a pleasant one, and my brain not fagged as now. I still [aged 43] have it occasionally, but not so frequently as twenty years ago.' It may be added that my friend, of Highland family, was a man of keen and emotional nervous temperament, a strenuous mental worker—whence at one time a serious breakdown in health—and had published two volumes of poems in early life. The greater liability to paramnesia in early life, which is generally recognised, is comparable to the special liability of children to hypnagogic visions, both phenomena being probably due to the greater excitability and easier exhaustibility of the youthful brain.
[234] For instance, by Allin, 'Recognition,' American Journal of Psychology, January 1896.