Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction TypeHoch, August
Science
Benign Stupors: A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type
Hoch, August
Manic-depressive illness; Stupor
Her verbal productions dealt with a rather limited range of
topics which can be briefly summarized. As in the other
cases, the reader will notice that the bulk of these ideas
are of a kind not usually prominent in the typical stupor
cases. Many of her thoughts seemed centered around her
husband. She always knew him when he visited her, but in
her thoughts there was a constant change as to his
personality. She persistently confused him with the
physicians, with her father, and with God, and one remark
is typical, “I thought he was God, priest, doctor,
lawyer--well, I wanted to go to Heaven; I thought he would
still be my husband; I always hoped that I would be home in
Heaven.” Not unnaturally with this confusion there were
doubts about her marriage. People said her marriage was
wrong and her husband bad. Frequently she thought he was
dead, or voices informed her that she was not married to
him, or that he was the devil in Hell. In this connection
she also said that people called her a whore, or it seemed
as if she were accused of not being married.
As prominently as appeared the ideas of the invalidity or
impossibility of her marriage, to the same extent did her
father assume an important rôle for her. As a rule he
appeared in religious guise as God, but often he was the
doctor--“I knew my father at home and my father in Heaven;
which God do you mean? did you say God or father?” At times
she spoke of being in Heaven and that God seemed to be God,
doctor or priest. In this connection there were ideas of
being under the power of some one, God, devil or father.
As is usually the case where strong interest is expressed
in the father, ideas of the mother being dead occurred,
although in the frankest form she reported them as dreams;
for instance, one night she woke up screaming, said that
she had dreamed that her mother was dead and her sister
dying. That, in the psychoanalytic sense, this represented
a removal of a rival, making union with her father easy,
appeared in the statement that her father was dead but that
she had dreamed he had come to life again for some one
else. When asked what she meant, the question had to be
repeated several times, then she said “My mother died, my
father and mother had a quarrel.” There is more than a
suggestion here of a difference in the significance of
death, in so far as it concerned the two parents. The
mother dies and remains dead, that is, she is gotten rid
of. The father dies but takes on a spiritual existence and
comes to life again, a frequent method in psychoses for
legitimizing the idea of union with the parent by
elimination of the grossly physical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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