Impulsivity

IMPULSIVITY. - In common language it indicates the tendency to perform, under the pressure of a sudden conscious or subconscious ideational-affective psychic state, sudden acts characterized by marks of unreasonableness, inopportuneness, suddenness, irresistibility.

Normally the act of intellectual motor appetition, framed within the plan of a representation of purpose, is sustained and expresses itself under the pressure of a motive, a psychological complex constituted by an idea more or less charged with affective tension. Therefore the characteristics of the act of will are modeled on those of the animating motive, logical or illogical, legitimate or illegitimate, proportionate or disproportionate; thus the impulsive act, whose determination is bound to the arising in the subject's mind of a sudden motive, often tyrannically obsessive, charged with affective tension, which does not arise logically from a well-ordered series of reasonable premises, and discharges itself tumultuously, disorderly through the psycho-physiological moment ("impulse"), into the practical act.

Two further circumstances contribute to i.: one psychological, represented by the permanent or momentary emptiness of consciousness, poor in or deprived of inhibitory counter-motives whereby the idea-motive tends automatically to turn into action; the other of a physiological nature, whereby the operative impulses tend to overflow from the delimited channels of conduction, unleashing, in a kind of internal short circuit, a storm of emotional and motor reactions extraneous or disproportionate to the plan of responses willed by the particular circumstances of the moment. I. can manifest itself in different degrees, from the lightest, in which the voluntary act loses in lesser or greater part its characteristics of ponderation and logical motivation, to the gravest, in which it assumes the aspect of an instinctive, immediate, violent reaction, in which the intellectual element seems absolutely absent, entirely absorbed by the violent emotional and motor discharge. Some authors (G. H. Schneider) wish to establish close relations, to the point of identity, between impulse and instinct, speaking of instinctive impulses which they group into "impulses-sensations", "impulses-perceptions", "impulses-ideas".

In particular, one witnesses the gravest manifestations of i. in epilepsy (v.), both in its disorderly forms of convulsive seizures and in the larval aspects of "equivalents" or in the sudden impulses to commit acts of violence, to set fires (pyromania), to destroy (clastomania); in the dipsomania of chronic alcoholism (v.); in the manic access and in the raptus melancholicus of manic-depressive psychosis, which can culminate in the sudden suicide of the patient; in many other forms of chronic intoxication or of psychosis, such as cocainism (v.), the various forms of dementia (v.), persecutory paranoia (v.), phrenasthenia, etc. Thus arises the medico-legal figure of the impulsive madman, capable of the most savage and sudden crimes, whose characteristic is the lack of utilitarian motivation, the incomprehension and indifference toward the harm done, the lack of remorse.

From the impulses of psychopaths must be distinguished the impulses of obsessive psychosis (v.), in which the individual has the sudden idea of performing an action disagreeable to him or in contrast with the intellectual or moral set-up of his own personality; the subject has the impression that he will not be able to resist the obsessive impulse that torments him and that is so painfully felt by his consciousness (and in this intellectual opposition and in this moral suffering lies, precisely, the specific difference from the impulsions of the mentally ill). If the action that is the object of the obsessive impulse is of slight importance, inoffensive, devoid of moral import, the individual ends up performing it, thus regaining, at least momentarily, his peace; if the idea involves a repugnant or gravely harmful or otherwise sinful action, this is inhibited and repressed, though the suffering of the struggle and of the fear of a possible future defeat remains.

I. always represents a defect of the normal unfolding of volitional activity and correspondingly of the imputability of the act performed. It is not possible to give here a general criterion of judgment, since it is bound to the characteristic of the illness producing the defect, whereby one may go from the case of the fullest irresponsibility to that of the most modest extenuating circumstance. One refers, therefore, to the individual entries treating the different chronic intoxications and psychoses capable of influencing the psycho-motor activity of the individual; v. also PASSIONS.

Giuseppe de Ninno