Paton and Zaimis (1949) showed that the members of a series of compounds composed of two tri-methyl ammonium groups linked by a polymethylene chain had various actions, such as producing neuro-muscular blocking, inhibition of cholinesterase, a muscarine-like action and a blocking of impulses at the autonomic ganglia. It has been found that hexamethonium is the most active of the above compounds in these respects, and the autonomic ganglionic blocking properties have clinical applications. Hexamethonium is usually used clinically as a dibromide.

The study of moderate degrees of alcoholic intoxication in such an animal as the rat demands methods of assessment of the state of the animals, which is a requirement not easy to provide. So far as the more complex integrated activity of the central nervous system is concerned, the use of a suitable maze affords some information of an objective kind. The book by Warden and others (1935) gives much information about construction and operation of mazes. Methods of recording based on projection by a lens (Yerkes and Kellog 1914; Watson, 1914) and the use of electrical contacts (Tolman and Jeffress 1925; Heron, 1933) have been described for rat mazes, while Miles (1928) has suggested the use of blotting-paper in conjunction with an ink writer to show relative speeds within a maze.

The study of eye disorders in maladjusted children plays an interesting and important role in the investigation of psychosomatic problems of child psychiatry. Eye diseases in maladjusted children are frequently caused or aggravated by psychogenic factors. They are also sometimes connected with neurological disorders.

Hurler's disease is a condition characterized essentially by mental defect, chondro-osteodystrophy, hepatosplenomegaly and corneal opacities. The complex was first noted in 1900, by John Thomson of Edinburgh who, recognizing that he was dealing with a new disease, named it after his first patient “Johnny McL—'s Disease.” Subsequent descriptions were those of Hunter (1917) and Gertrud Hurler (1919).

Mental deficiency has been defined by Tredgold as a state of arrested or incomplete development of the mind. Numerous scientists have for long endeavoured to ascertain the cause or causes of this frequent abnormality. The protagonists of one school of thought made exaggerated claims that the great majority, if not all cases, were due to hereditary factors. Other investigators were able to demonstrate that certain special types of mental defectives owed their deficiency to agents acting after fertilization, and so came to the conclusion that genetic elements were only concomitant and not primary causative factors in many, if not in all types of defectives, and that research on these lines should eventually establish extrinsic causation in all these cases.

Thus one has gradually come to distinguish between two main groups of mentally abnormal individuals; those in whom endogenous or hereditary factors could be proved or at least suspected. (Tredgold speaks of primary aments, Strauss of endogenous types, and those in whom exogenous noxious influences could be demonstrated or suspected, and whom Tredgold termed secondary aments, Strauss calls exogenous types.) According to Tredgold and many other investigators, from between 70 to 80 per cent. of all defectives are to be found in the first group, while roughly 20 to 30 per cent. belong to the second. Penrose's figures in support of a hereditary causation are even higher.

In determining the parameters of structure and function in the group of patients designated as schizophrenic, increasing stress has been laid on endocrinal function. A great deal of work is being done to clarify adrenocortical function. We are about to begin similar studies in respect to thyroid responsivity, using radioactive iodine as an indicator. The present report deals with a third aspect of the endocrine system.

The present study was undertaken to relate testicular changes such as those reported by Hemphill, Reiss and Taylor to adrenocortical and thyroid responsivity.

The Rorschach ink-blot test is so well known amongst present-day psychologists that any attempt to describe its composition and the aims and ambitions of its protagonists would be presumptuous. However, the underlying assumptions involved in the use of the test are neither so widely understood nor so universally accepted. It is for this reason that there have been so many and so various attempts to establish the validity of the Rorschach.

Students of the paintings produced by mental hospital patients believe that schizophrenics show peculiarities in their use of colour. Impressions in the matter have been summarized by Reitman (1950). Schizophrenics, especially the chronic, seem to favour colours avoided by others, particularly shades of mauvish-red. They put colours into relationships that others find displeasing. They employ colours more boldly than others. Sometimes, it would appear, they purposely depict objects in colours at variance with those possessed in real perception.

Three years ago at the last International Congress of Psychology I reported on a preliminary investigation of personality changes after the usual standard prefrontal leucotomy. This investigation was carrried out on 20 neurotic patients before and three months after the operation performed by Mr. McKissock (McKissock, 1943). An extensive group of objective personality tests were chosen to define the factors of “Neuroticism” and “Introversion” as described by Eysenck (1947), which to all intents and purposes are equivalent to Cattell's (1950) factors C and F. In addition, the following intelligence tests were used: the Wechsler Scale, Porteus Mazes, and the proverbs from the Stanford Binet. The changes found provided us with some evidence in support of the hypothesis with which the investigation had been planned. This was that as a result of this type of incision in the frontal lobe there was a decrease in “Neuroticism,” a decrease in “Introversion” and a decrease in certain aspects of intelligence (Petrie, 1949a).

Since then a further 50 patients have been examined before and after operations on the frontal lobes, bringing the total to 70. Most of these were severe neurotics attending the psychiatric department of Dr. Desmond Curran at St. George's Hospital, London. Only those changes will be referred to as an alteration in personality where the probability is less than one in twenty that they could have occurred by chance.

The a-b ridge count, called the a-b count for short, is the number of epidermal ridges crossing or touching a fine straight line drawn joining the triradii a and b on the palm. The triradial point or the radiant when the former is absent is not included in the count. It was pointed out in a previous work (Fang, 1949) that on the assumption that the university students are more intelligent than the general population there is a consistent increase of the mean a-b count with intelligence. The results of the present study seem to agree with this finding.

In abreaction under any of the methods in use, a phase of cortical excitation is followed by a phase of temporary cortical inhibition with rupture of pre-existing patterns of conditioned reflexes and behaviour, a phase in which new modes of behaviour are easily adopted, the ultra-paradoxical phase (Pavlov, 1934). In this phase the patient is extremely suggestible, and this corresponds to psychological transference always found in post-abreactive states (Shorvon and Sargant, 1947).

IN a previous paper (Bullock, Clancey and Fleischhacker, 1951) an attempt was made to separate schizophrenic reaction syndromes, due to diagnosable and often successfully treatable disease of known etiology, from idiopathic or cryptogenic schizophrenia. It was shown that the criteria of idiopathic schizophrenia are—

1. (1) Positivey : (a) Mentally, the classical symptoms of inadequacy and inappropriateness : of thought (paralogia), of affect (parapathema), to which one may add of volition (paraboulema), usually accompanied by hallucinations, paranoid ideas, etc.

   (b) Physically, a slightly pathological C.S.F., due essentially to an increase of the globulin fraction.

2. (2) Negalively : the absence of generally acknowledged organic disease of the brain, or any physical disease which is known to produce such disorders of the central nervous system or the C.S.F., as mentioned under (i).

In a paper published in the Journal of Mental Science for July, 1950, I suggested that head-banging originated in the infant's desire to reproduce the thrust of the mother's apex-beat against his head while he was being nursed on her left arm, either as a means of self-comfort or in retaliation for what he had felt to be an attack or as both combined. In the present paper I propose to analyse this infantile experience further, and to trace to some of its component elements certain other peculiarities of childish behaviour.

I shall begin by considering the case of a bottle-fed baby, that is to say, one who at every feed is held in his mother's left arm with his right temple against her left breast (and I shall suppose that the mother is not herself a case of dextrocardia.) In addition to the teat in his mouth and the milk being swallowed, such an infant feels the thrust of the mother's apex as a series of taps against his head which tend to impart to the latter a rolling side-to-side movement, he hears her heart-beat as a rhythmic lub-dup, he feels the rise and fall of her chest in respiration as a slower to and fro rocking of his whole body, and he hears the sighing rustle of her breathing beneath his ear. The sound and thrust of the heart-beat are of course louder and stronger at the limit of the mother's expirations, and indeed the tap of the apex may be felt only then. In other words, the suckling hears two separate series of interwoven unsynchronized rhythmic sounds continuing throughout the whole of his feeding times. In addition to all this, he feels the warmth of the maternal body, the steady clasp of the mother's arm, he smells the milk and the woman's body odour (sweaty, or scented by her soap and talcum powder), and lastly, he feels (and may smell) her breath as an intermittent warm breeze on his face and in his hair. The mother seldom speaks while she is feeding her baby, and the room is often quiet, mother and child being alone together. A breast-fed baby also feels smooth warm skin under his fingers, but he has the mother's heart against his head, during only half his feeding times.

The other occasions on which a woman commonly holds a child firmly against her breast are, of course, when she is trying to comfort a crying baby, or to restrain a struggling toddler from escaping to some forbidden activity. Here the child is angry and the mother herself often either anxious or angry or both, so that her heartbeat is greatly increased in force, and the furious infant feels it as a series of aggressive blows on his head, each of which is accompanied by a bumping noise.

A search of the literature has not revealed a report of the depersonalization syndrome occurring in identical twins, although Palmer (1946) published a report of twins in which one patient was described as suffering from “all round loss of interest with some depression…. His thoughts … milled round in a ceaseless turmoil concerning his loss of contact with people and things. There was some complaint of unreality and loss of sexual desire…. His condition was one of distressed perplexity. The illness had come on gradually.” The second patient had “tried to get his twin brother to ‘pull himself together,’ when one Saturday he became intoxicated and for a wager attempted bestiality. He woke up next morning feeling unutterably guilty and depressed, and rapidly developed feelings of unreality. His compelling symptom was the fear that his mind was disintegrating.”

These cases appear essentially depressive and progressed to a woeful, hypochondriacal state six years later.

This paper describes a preliminary survey, in which an attempt was made to discover if recognizable E.E.G. patterns could be correlated with consistent patterns of behaviour in a group of aged mental hospital patients.

The majority of investigations into psychological changes due to E.C.T. have been undertaken to assess the effect of treatment on the patient's memory. Sherman, Mergener and Levitin (1941), testing for retention of material assimilated on the same occasion as it had to be recalled or recognized, found no significant effect of E.C.T. upon memory. Zubin and Barrera (1941) found that E.C.T. removed the saving that would otherwise have occurred between learning and re-learning paired associates. They also reported that the effect of treatment on the recognition of material was less severe than on its recall, and this was confirmed by Mayer-Gross (1943).

The present paper reports psychological changes which have been found to take place during a course of treatment with E.C.T. as well as before and after. The investigation is a development of a pilot experiment undertaken with Dr. M. Roth which was briefly reported at the International Congress of Psychiatry, Paris, 1950.