This diffused hysteroid condition may be illustrated by the results of a psychological investigation carried on in America by Miss Gertrude Stein among the ordinary male and female students of Harvard University and Radcliffe College.  The object of the investigation was to study, with the aid of a planchette, the varying liability to automatic movements among normal individuals.  Nearly one hundred students were submitted to experiment.  It was found that automatic responses could be obtained in two sittings from all but a small proportion of the students of both sexes, but that there were two types of individual who showed a special aptitude.  One type (probably showing the embryonic form of neurasthenia) was a nervous, high-strung, imaginative type, not easily influenced from without, and not so much suggestible as autosuggestible.  The other type, which is significant from our present point of view, is thus described by Miss Stein:  “In general the individuals, often blonde and pale, are distinctly phlegmatic.  If emotional, decidedly of the weakest, sentimental order.  They may be either large, healthy, rather heavy, and lacking in vigor or they may be what we call anaemic and phlegmatic.  Their power of concentrated attention is very small.  They describe themselves as never being held by their work; they say that their minds wander easily; that they work on after they are tired, and just keep pegging away.  They are very apt to have premonitory conversations, they anticipate the words of their friends, they imagine whole conversations that afterward come true.  The feeling of having been there is very common with them; that is, they feel under given circumstances that they have had that identical experience before in all its details.  They are often fatalistic in their ideas.  They indulge in day-dreams.  As a rule, they are highly suggestible."[283]

There we have a picture of the physical constitution and psychic temperament on which the classical symptoms of hysteria might easily be built up.[284] But these persons were ordinary students, and while a few of their characteristics are what is commonly and vaguely called “morbid,” on the whole they must be regarded as ordinarily healthy individuals.  They have the congenital constitution and predisposition on which some severe psychic lesion at the “psychological moment” might develop the most definite and obstinate symptoms of hysteria, but under favorable circumstances they will be ordinary men and women, of no more than ordinary abnormality or ordinary power.  They are among the many who have been called to hysteria at birth; they may never be among the few who are chosen.

We may have to recognize that on the side of the sexual emotions, as well as in general constitution, a condition may be traced among normal persons that is hysteroid in character, and serves as the healthy counterpart of a condition which in hysteria is morbid.  In women such a condition Has been traced (though misnamed) by Dr. King.[285]