Married at the age of twenty, she bore four children in succession.
This was a drain on the poor woman, and further weakened her
feeble constitution. Her husband was a poor tailor working in
a sweat-shop, making but a few dollars a week. The family was
practically kept in a state of chronic starvation. The wolf was
hardly kept away from the door. The family was in constant dread of
“slack time” with its loss of employment and consequent privations
and suffering.
The husband was a hard worker, did not drink, but the long hours of
work, the low wages, the poor nutrition, the vicious air, and the
no less vicious environment, cheerless and monotonous, sometimes
gave rise to moods, discontent, anger, and quarrels, of which the
patient with her timidity stood in utter terror.
The patient’s dream life was strongly colored by a general
underlying mood of apprehension. The fear instinct of
self-preservation formed the soil of the whole emotional tone
of the psychosis, waking, sub-waking, dreaming, conscious, and
subconscious. Again and again did the nurses and attendants report
to me that, although the patient was aphonic and it was hard to
elicit from her a sound, in her sleep she quite often cried out,
sometimes using phrases and words which were hard to comprehend,
because they were indistinct, and because they were sometimes in
her native language. When awakened immediately, it was sometimes
possible to elicit from her shreds of dreams in regard to scares
and frights about herself, about her children, about her husband,
relatives, and friends. When she came under my care the patient
often used to wake up in the morning in a state of depression due
to some horrible hallucinatory dreams in which she lived over
again in a distorted form, due to incoordination of content and to
lack of active, guiding attention, dreams in which the dreadful
experience of her miserable life kept on recurring under various
forms of fragmentary association and vague synthesis, brought
about by accidental, external and internal stimulations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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