There are patients who in the first stage have the fear and horror of committing an act and who in the second stage are driven to accomplish it.  In other cases a subject may make use of an action as a means of exciting and raising himself; he seeks it, and the thought of this action is accompanied by love and desire.  Let him become depressed and he will no longer be able to accomplish this same action without exhausting himself; he is then reduced to dread it and take an aversion to it.  That which was an object of love becomes an object of hatred.  Thence these turnings of mind that are so often to be observed in the course of neuroses and psychoses.  In a score of my observations the frenzy of persecution and hatred presents itself as an evolution of those obsessions of love and domination.

These are very curious facts that one observes in the oscillations of the mind, in particular when the psychasthenic depression becomes more serious and transforms itself in psychasthenic delirium, which is more frequent than one generally imagines.  As a rule the properly so-called psychasthenic has only disorders of the reflection; he doubts but he does not rave.  But under different influences, his depression may augment, and when he drops below reflection he has no longer the doubts, the hesitations, he no longer shows manias of love and of direction, he transforms his obsessions into deliriums and often his loves into hatreds.

These are a few examples of the perturbations of conduct common to neurotic sufferers and the diseased in mind.  One perceives that the same laws relating to the diminution of force and the lowering of the psychological tension intervene in the same way with the one as with the others.  The distinctions, which have been established for social reasons and practical conveniences, no longer exist when one tries to find, by analysis of the symptoms, the nature of neuroses and psychoses.

The latter reflection shows us, however, that in certain cases, at least, there is a certain difference in degree between neuroses and psychoses.  The evolution of the human mind has been formed by degrees, by successive stages, and we possess in ourselves a series of superposed layers which correspond to diverse stages of the psychological development; when our forces diminish we lose successively these diverse layers commencing with the highest.  It is the superior floors of the buildings that are reached first by the bombardments of the war and the cellars are not destroyed at first; they acquire even more importance, as people are beginning to inhabit them.  Well, according as the depression descends more or less deeply, the disorders which result from the loss of the superior functions and the exaggerated action of the inferior ones become more and more serious and are appreciated differently.  The superior psychological functions are, in my opinion, experimental tendencies and rational tendencies.  They are tendencies