ABSTRACT
Having these symptoms before us, it may be as well to give in outline the psychological speculations designed to explain the clinical picture. It will be remembered that, in discussing absorbed manic states and the phenomena we termed distraction of thought, it was pointed out that certain consequences—the symptoms—followed from the turning of attention from the external world to the flux of free associations which constitutes our inner (and, normally, largely unconscious) mental life. The theory of perplexity involves the same kind of reasoning. If one assumes that attention is divided, that it goes both towards inner thinking and observation of the environment, then one can see how this splitting of attention would cause symptoms such as we have described, provided the instinctive tendency to retain a grasp of objective reality were retained.
