A year or more before Clark's paper appeared, I had arrived at certain
general conclusions regarding the subject of tics.
G. Stanley Hall has arrived at similar conclusions in his inspiring
Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear[8] and I wish here to acknowledge my
indebtedness to his paper for making my own ideas clearer to me, for having
given me broader standpoints and for clearly presenting a theory which shall
form the basis of the remainder of this paper.
[8] In the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XXV, in the July issue et
seq.
Let us first take up the tic movements and see whether we can arrive at a
rational explanation for their appearance.
The different varieties of tic movements embrace the entire field or range
of systematic, physiologically coordinated voluntary muscular activities.
The main types of tics may be enumerated at this point: facial tics, which
are the most frequent and which may be tonic or clonic, are tics of mimicry
and express emotions; tics of the ear or auditory tics; nictitation and
vision tics, particularly of the eyelids; tics of sniffing; tics of sucking;
tics of licking; tics of biting and of mastication, and mental trismus; tics
of nodding, tossing, affirmation, negation, salutation and mental
torticollis; trunk, arm and shoulder tics; snatching tics; the professional
or occupational spasms, which are really a special atypical form of tics;
walking and leaping tics; tics of spitting, swallowing, vomiting, eructation
and wind sucking (aerophagia); tics of snoring, sniffing, blowing,
whistling, coughing, sobbing, hiccoughing; tics of speech, including all
sorts of sounds, stammering (in some cases), habit expressions, echolalia
and echopraxia.
It is thus seen that we have here physiological and biological acts of
different manifestations and purposes.
The tic movements have a certain significance at the time of their
performance. The physiological functions are definite.
The Magnan school insisted that tics are not morbid entities but episodic
syndromes of mental degeneration. Charcot referred to tic as a sort of
hereditary aberration, which, I may add, is surely true when we view it from
the phylogenetic standpoint, as representing a resurrection of what was at
one time a normal tendency or reaction. Noir has called attention to the
fact that the movements found in the tics correspond to the infant's
spontaneous muscular play, which means the muscular play of all mankind.
These authors were directing their efforts in the right direction. To
appreciate this we need but remember that the mechanisms or the
potentialities for the movements are inherited and have a phylogenetic
significance. At a lower psychic level, far back in our phylogenetic racial
history, all of these movements, perhaps then in a rudimentary form, had a
single, original meaning. This meaning was self-preservation, and it was
because of its value as a means of adaptation or reaction to the
environment, with the consequent maintenance of self-preservation; that the
movements or the mechanisms of the movements were selected for survival and
for hereditary transmission as inherent, unconscious, organic mechanisms,
processes or engrams. The original, phylogenetic significance attained at a
low cultural or psychic level, relatively unconscious, may or may not later
be consciously associated or dominate its subsequent functioning. But its
primary, biological significance, its real raison d'etre is to be found in
the phylogenetic, racial history of man. The present life history with its
varied experiences do but act as stimuli or as exciting factors to bring
once more into activity functions which have been preserved in the organic
structure of the nervous system.
In our return to phylogenetic, ontogenetic, rudimentary, unconscious,
organic reactions, to atavistic, prehistoric, performed, embryonic, immature
methods of response, the vestigial remnants, revivals of long ago, which
have been submerged but which now reappear due to our reversionary
tendencies--uprooted by dissociation, disintegration or regression, with its
lapse or descent to low cultural or psychic levels--these old components
which reappear or rather fall apart and appear as independent activities,
are exaggerated, inflated, caricatured or excessively performed. In our
devolutionary tendency toward ancestral methods of reaction, the individual,
resolved, so to speak, into his proximate elements, permits or is compelled
by biological determinism to permit these split off tendencies to break
forth once more, albeit in exaggerated fashion, as if let loose from the
leash of control by the higher nervous centres, and reanimified,
intensified, and magnified, our infantile, archaic, instinctive, inherited,
hidden, phylogenetic tendencies or activities held sway.
It seems to me that it is well worth while to quote at some length from G.
Stanley Hall, that great exponent of genetic psychology and all that it
stands for. His very stimulating and inspiring paper on fear, to which I
have already referred, is freely quoted in the following paragraphs.
According to geneticism, Stanley Hall tells us, all responses to shock are
vestiges of once useful reactions. In fact, the shock neuroses and shock
psychoses, if analyzable psychogenetically, "would be found to be reversions
to, and also perhaps more often than we suspect, magnifications of acts and
psychic states that were at one time the fittest of which our forebears were
capable.[9] However, all the pathological phenomena of today are not mere
revivals of the acts and states of primitive man and his ancestors, but
"they are often, on the other hand, grotesque variants and intensifications
of phylogenetic originals that were more sane and simple if also more
generic. Shock symptoms may thus be symbols of long past racial experiences
which when we have learned to interpret them more fully will tell us much of
the early history of our phylum."[10] It is the outbreaks of emotion which
"mark the incursions of the race into the narrow life of the
individual."[11]
[9] Loc. cit., pp. 178-179.
[10] Loc. cit., p. 179.
[11] Loc. cit., p. 183.
Furthermore, "the central nervous system differs from all others in that it
is par excellence the organ of registration and of physiological memory. It
is there that the traces of ancestral experience are stored so that almost
nothing that was ever essential in the development of the phylum is ever
entirely lost. Hence suggestive as are many physical traits of our racial
history, the intangible psychophysic traits must be assumed to be both far
more numerous and more indelible.
"While these faint tendencies often crop out in a behavioristic way, by far
the most of them need some stimulus of individual experiences to awaken
them, and still more exist only in the slight facilitization of impulses or
permeability of nervous centres, lability of molecular or neural tensions,
or as preferential re-enforcements, in one rather than in another direction
or manner."[12]
[12] Loc. cit., p. 351-352.
It is obvious that motor expressions of shock or motor methods of adaptation
or reaction are much older and far more prominent than psychic. But although
a changed environment made the old types of defense obsolete, they still
persist, "in a sthenic if somewhat now inco-ordinated way, and when they are
called into action now they evoke a faint phosphorescence of the old
primordial feeling."[13]
[13] Loc. cit., p. 197.
In brief it should be said that no matter how refined and how highly
cultured we are, we still fear and react to emotions "in the same terms of
the same old gross organs and functions as do the brutes."[14]
[14] Loc. cit., p. 197.