nses begin
to functionate in a fallacious manner, and he thus succeeds in shutting
out from consciousness, for the time being at least, the entire
unbearable situation. Upon emerging from his stupor he has a more or
less complete amnesia for the deed and its attending circumstances, and
finding himself confronted with accusations, cross-examinations, and
lastly, conviction, he at once sets about, so to speak, to square
himself with the situation. What does he do? He develops a quite
limited, well-organized delusional system in which he finds himself
absolutely innocent, his accusers are the guilty ones, and the entire
situation is nothing more nor less than a well-planned plot to destroy
him. His supposed victim has not been murdered at all, but is living and
secretly active in plotting and scheming against him, the accused.

In this artificially created world he lives with comparative ease, and
has thus succeeded in reaching a proper adjustment to the situation.

The most interesting part of it all is that this so well-organized and
apparently fixed delusional system may disappear at once and the various
false ideas may become entirely corrected as soon as the provocative
agent which is at the bottom of it all is removed. This is a fair
example of what has been termed an acute prison psychosis, and occurs
with considerable frequency among prisoners awaiting trial. Naturally,
these psychoses, being, as they are, psychologically motived, are
extremely variable in their manifestations, but at the root they are all
alike and impress the observer as something entirely different from the
pure endogenous mental disorders. They are all psychically evoked
reactive manifestations of a particularly predisposed constitution to
definite deleterious environmental conditions. Some of the cases
reported in the first paper of this series are good examples of this
type of mental disorder.

We owe our knowledge of these disorders to the contributions of Reich,
Moeli, Kutner, Ganser, Rish and others, authors who, although describing
a more or less identical symptom-complex, have given to it different
names, such as hysterical stupor, Ganser symptom-complex, catatonia of
degenerates, etc. The distinguishing features of this disorder are its
psychic origin, that is, its development in consequence of some strongly
affective experience, and its high grade of impressionability to things
in the environment which may at any time suddenly cause