EPILEPTIC CONSTITUTION. The epileptic constitution, or makeup, has long been recognized as the mental stigma of essen tial epilepsy itself. Only recently have studies disclosed that the main tenets of such a char acter are present years before the nervous disorder of epilepsy, as such, is shown in fits. Indeed, most frequently defects of personality may be detected in earliest child hood. The chief instinctive defects are ego centricity, supersensitiveness and emotional poverty. The potential epileptic is intensively self-centred and fails to project his life inter ests into his environment in a normal and healthful manner. Partly because of this char acter-fault, and still more because of his innate inheritance, he is or soon becomes unduly sen sitized to all forms of stress and annoyinc de mands. He either extraverts his supersensitive ness by exhibitions of rage and tantrums of a type more severe than those occasionally seen in passionate children, or he introverts this feeling and represses his environmental con flicts, causing- him to develop a very unstable, • irritable and sullen emotional life, which paves the way for larger and more difficult adapta tions which he cannot meet ; outspoken fits may then occur. By possessing an egocentric and
supersensitive makeup, the potential epileptic fails to make the degree of environmental con tact which would lead him into a broad and rich experience with life, hence sooner or later he fails to acquire a well-rounded emotional de velopment. This deficit may or may not limit the individual's purely intellectual equipment in later life. Previously endowed with the in stinctive defects noted, the demands of adoles cence and adult life increase the difficulties of such individuals until they reach the breaking point in a fit or seizure. Hand in hand with the handicap of defective endowment occurs a disintegration of habits and character, known as deterioration, which often precedes actual epileptic seizures for a considerable time. This accounts for the fact that an essential epileptic from the very nature of his makeup is usually doomed to mental failure in its broadest sense if proper measures to check or controvert his innate faults are not taken at the earliest possi ble moment. Any effective plan of treatment must essentially take strict and early account of the makeup of epileptics before all else.