Idees Fixes

IDEES FIXES, fixed ideas, an outdated term now rarely used. Old French psychiatrists meant by this name all cases where persons with preserved orientation in their surroundings and relatively reasonable behavior exhibited in their consciousness single, but firmly entrenched and not susceptible to elimination by reasonable arguments, clearly incorrect, absurd thoughts, regardless of whether the patient is aware of the absurdity of these thoughts or not. Accordingly, on the one hand, obsessive thoughts, and on the other hand, so-called single-subject delusional thoughts (monomanias), i.e., psychopathological phenomena of essentially completely different orders, were included in the group of I. i. P. Janet also fell into this confusion of concepts, although he understood fixed ideas mainly as phenomena of mental obsessiveness (Zwangserscheinungen of German authors) or, in his own words, 'not only obsessive ideas, but also obsessive emotional states and certain, unchanging personality states.' Practically, when speaking of I. f., P. Janet often has in mind phenomena that were later associated by the Freudian school with the concept of 'complex.' This corresponds to the circumstance that Janet considers I. f. symptoms of neuroses in general, and hysteria in particular, and attributes to them the property of disappearing from the waking state of consciousness in order to appear during sleep or hypnosis.