Catalepsy

CATALEPSY. - An extreme degree of volitional blockage with complete incapacity for any activity, combined with a particular passive pliability of the muscles of the various parts of the body ("waxy flexibility"), whereby the patient can be posed by others — head, trunk, limbs — in any position, however difficult or uncomfortable, and maintains it even for a long time, until it is changed or ceases of itself through fatigue. During the cataleptic state every organic activity (respiration, circulation, sensibility) is weakened and dulled; the memory of what took place in it is incomplete or absent.

In c. the patient can be moved to activity by imitation, automatically repeating the acts (echopraxia) or the words (echolalia) of those around him, or under the impulse of a suggestion, as happens in that state of suspension and almost of emptying of psychological consciousness produced by hypnotism (v.), in which the sick person can be led to enact feelings and actions instilled in him by the experimenter through oral or visual suggestion. C. is observable in hysteria (v.), in epilepsy (v.), in manic forms, and particularly in dementia praecox. C. can be induced in himself by the subject himself, as in the "autocatalepsy" of the Hindu fakirs (v. FACHIRISM) or in the course of metapsychic manifestations, at times assuming the appearance of a supernatural fact.

Giuseppe de Ninno