one
spot. His face takes on an astonished expression, the gaze is vacant and
indefinite. If he makes any movements at all they are hesitating,
uncertain, as those of a drunken man. Vertigo and aura-like sensations
appear; severe anxiety overpowers the patient, which with the entire
force of a powerful affect crowds out all other concepts and sensations
and dominates the entire personality. Consciousness becomes more and
more clouded, soon illusions, hallucinations, and delusions appear, and
the prisoner becomes especially taken up with ideas of unknown evil
powers, of demons and spirits, and of being persecuted and possessed by
the devil. Simultaneously they complain about all sorts of bodily
sensations. In isolated cases one may observe convulsive twitchings of
the voluntary and involuntary musculature. Finally severe motor
excitements set in. The patient becomes noisy, screams, runs aimlessly
about, destroys and ruins everything that comes his way. With this the
disease has reached its height. At this stage consciousness is entirely
in abeyance and the disorder is followed by complete amnesia." Reich
supposes that this acute prison psychosis may be included in that large
group of abnormal psychic processes, developing from affect and
affect-like situations.

Reich's important work remained the only one on the subject until 1888,
when Moeli again called attention to it. Moeli[4] spoke of patients in
whom an apparent total blocking of all thought processes took place.
They would exhibit complete ignorance of the most commonplace facts,
would forget such well-known things as their own name, place of birth,
or age; were unable to recognize the denominations of coins, etc. He
noted, however, that although the answers these patients gave were
false, they had a certain relation to the question. For instance, coins
of a lower denomination would be mistaken for higher ones, postage
stamps were called paper, etc. They also showed a marked tendency to
elaborate all sorts of false reminiscences about their past life. Along
with this failure of the simplest thought and memory activity, these
individuals were otherwise well-ordered and behaved.

The reader will at once recognize in the above description the
well-known Ganser symptom-complex, the several variations of which have
been so frequently discussed of late years. Ganser[5] further showed
that these cases frequently evidenced vivid auditory and visual
hallucinations. At t