Impulsive Actions

IMPULSIVE ACTIONS, a designation applied to phenomena that are diverse in their psychopathological essence, yet share the common feature that all of them represent motor acts stemming not from reasoning, but from immediate internal urges (impulses), and occurring immediately upon the emergence of the latter without any preliminary struggle of motives. The following groups of such actions can be distinguished: 1. Impulsive actions resulting from the excessive strength of affects. This includes both outbursts of affective motor reactions that have broken free from the control of reason—standing on the border of normality—and manifestations of "pathological affects" in the proper sense of the word, including criminal acts supposed to be based on a "short-circuit" mechanism. 2. Impulsive actions committed under the influence of excessively strong and pathologically perverted drives. A person usually strives to suppress the latter, resulting in a constant internal tension that is resolved from time to time by irresistible impulsive discharges (see Impulsive insanity). 3. A separate group comprises cases where impulsive actions arise on the basis of prolonged and intense affective states brought to life by one mental illness or another; such are attempts at suicide and self-mutilation in melancholic patients (raptus melancholicus), then the often extremely dangerous aggressive actions of epileptics experiencing a morbid mood disorder, and finally, seemingly completely inexplicable antics of schizophrenics that are actually conditioned by affective complexes—antics whose distinguishing feature, besides their apparent absurdity, is a tendency to stereotyped repetition in the future, each time with progressively less affective coloration. 4. Finally, a completely special position is occupied by those unexpected and incomprehensible acts characteristic of the catatonic form of schizophrenia, in relation to which the patients committing them usually completely lack a sense of personal initiative ("catatonic automatisms"). Sometimes the patient experiences the feeling of the action's alienness to their personality so intensely that they delusionally attribute its origin to the influence of some extraneous force or alien will. It is not always possible to strictly demarcate impulsive actions from obsessive ones (see Obsessive states). For details on the mechanism of their origin, see Impulsive insanity. Attempts to divide impulsive actions according to their content, such as arson (pyromania), theft (kleptomania), impulsive assaults, the urge to bite oneself and others (dacnomania), and so forth, have not proved very successful and have been retained only in part.