Tourette Syndrome

“Given the persistence of the connection between both Sydenham’s chorea and convulsive tic behaviors with prior rheumatic disease, why did tic behaviors continue to be categorized as pathologically separate from other choreas? The answer to this question is tied, in large part, to the triumph of the psychologizing [viz, the fixation on psychological theories of degeneration] that increasingly affected late nineteenth-century thinking and developed into psychoanalytic categories by the 1920s. . . . The assumption that motor and vocal tics were psychopathological and vaguely hereditary developed such paradigmatic force that practitioners felt obligated to explain away rather than to engage in analysis of any contrary evidence” (Kushner, 39, 40).