Hiroshi Ohashi

Apropos of Changing Concepts of Consciousness in Psychopathology

If we find in “Philosophy of symbolical forms” (Vol.3, 1929) a remark of E. Cassirer: “... The concept of consciousness seems to be a real Proteus of philosophy...”, and if we again read in an introduction of C.-F. Graumann (1966) to the problems of consciousness in psychology: “...For too many discussions, sustained up to this day in order to clarify the notion of consciousness, carry the character of concept-exegesis”, — then nobody would surely refuse to recognize that also in psychiatry the state of affairs in this respect is not much different; psychiatry borrowed indeed in her modern cradle the fundamental concept in question from nowhere else than the two older sciences mentioned above, thereby being compelled at the same time, however, to put up with the very same complications as theirs. These conceptual difficulties have not remained in fact without being mentioned in numerous textbooks and contributions of psychiatry, leading not a few authors, by reason of its alleged obscurities, to dismiss the notion of “disturbed consciousness” held to be of no clinical use, while others have found themselves entitled to consider every phenomenon of derangement in human psychical life in view of disordered consciousness.