Perseveration

PERSEVERATION, the tendency of certain ideas, movements, actions, and the like to repeatedly return to consciousness. Every idea that enters consciousness has a tendency to reappear in consciousness (association) and the more intensively so, the fewer other ideas there are in consciousness, but in certain cases this tendency becomes especially strong. It is necessary to distinguish perseveration from stereotypy, in which there is an endless repetition of the same speech or motor manifestations, but with the difference that their content is not determined, as in perseveration, by associative activity and the content of consciousness, but is to a significant degree accidental. Perseveration should also be distinguished from obsessive phenomena, in which there must always be an element of subjectively experienced obsessiveness and compulsion, accompanied by full awareness of the senselessness of the arising ideas, the absurdity of the given actions or movements, and so on. Most frequently in clinical practice one encounters speech perseveration, but any mental formations can persevere, including affects, and especially frequently complexes of ideas vividly colored by an affective tone. Perseveration is observed in a wide variety of nervous and mental diseases, most frequently in genuine epilepsy, in arteriosclerosis, and in all organic dementias. The speech of demented epileptics, for example, is especially abundant in perseveration: patients invariably return in conversation to the same previously touched-upon question despite the fact that other, new questions have been posed to them. In an exquisite form, this phenomenon appears here in the so-called association experiment. Perseveration is frequently observed in aphasics, when a patient during an examination gets stuck on a specific word and repeats it with every new task, although that word is no longer needed, and in apraxia, when a patient correspondingly perseverates certain movements. In everyday life, phenomena of perseveration are observed during fatigue; the content of dreams, especially when some affectively colored experiences persistently repeat in them, is also often attempted to be explained by phenomena of perseveration. The inclination toward perseveration is characteristic of all people (children to a greater degree than adults), but apparently to varying degrees. In connection with this, an attempt was even made (Schultz) to isolate a special type of people with an enhanced capacity for the fixation of mental experiences (the so-called "perseverating psychopaths").

S. Zhislin