Psychosomatic Medicine 10:193-202 (1948)
© 1948 American Psychosomatic Society

Studies in Epilepsy: Personality Pattern, Situational Stress, and the Symptoms of Narcolepsy

¹ New York Hospital and the Department of Medicine, Cornell University Medical College, New York City, and the Veterans Administration Hospital, Bronx, New York

From this study, the following conclusions, perhaps applicable to the general problem of narcolepsy, may be drawn:

The life history and the personality pattern of the narcoleptic patient are characterized by conflict between emotional needs requiring relationships with others and denial of these needs expressed in a struggle for "independence."

Narcoleptic symptoms interrupt integrated activity in situations evoking the life problems when behavior is elaborating into patterns consciously unacceptable to the patient.

Narcoleptic symptoms also occur when the patient's interest in the environment is minimal and tension from internal needs is absent.

Narcolepsy, as a disease, may then be viewed as a pattern of discontinuous organism-environment integration in which interruptions occur whenever intolerable distress arises in the course of the existing integration or whenever chronic distress and immediate decrease of biologic tensions reduce the degree of integration below the waking level.