An investigation, by means of the hypnoidal states, brought out
of the patient’s subconscious life the following data: When a
child of three years, the patient lived with his family in a
small village near a large forest infested with wolves. In one of
the intermediary states a faint memory, rather to say a vision,
struggled up, a vision of wolves and dogs. Some one cried out:
“Run, wolves are coming!” Crazed with fear, he ran into the hut and
fell fainting on the floor. It turned out to be dogs instead of
a pack of wolves. It is that fright in early childhood which has
persisted in the subconscious mind, and, having become associated
with subsequent experiences of attacks of dogs, has found
expression in the patient’s consciousness as an instinctive fear of
dogs.
But why was the patient in such abject terror of dead people? This
found its answer in the experiences and training of his early life.
When a young child, the patient heard all kinds of ghost stories,
and tales of wandering lost souls and of spirits of dead people
hovering about the churchyard and burial grounds; he heard tales
of ghouls and of evil spirits inhabiting deserted places, dwelling
in the graves of sinners and the wicked. He listened to stories of
haunted houses and of apparitions stalking about in the dark. His
social and religious environment has been saturated with the belief
in the supernatural, as is usually the case among the superstitious
populations of Eastern Europe. We cannot wonder, then, that an
impressionable child brought up under such conditions should stand
in mortal fear of the supernatural, especially of the dead.
When the patient was about nine years old, his parents noticed
some prominences on his right chest. It was suggested to them that
the hand of a dead person possessed the property of blighting life
and arresting all growth, and would, therefore, prove a “powerful
medicine” for undesirable growths. It happened that an old woman
in the neighborhood died. The little boy was taken into the room
where the dead body was lying, and the cold hand of the corpse was
put on the child’s naked chest. The little fellow fainted away in
terror. The fear of dead people became subconsciously fixed, and
manifested itself as an insistent fear of the dead, and, in fact,
of anything connected with the dead and the world of spirits.
The patient had hardly recovered from the shock of the “dead hand,”
when he had to pass through a still more severe experience. A party
of drunken soldiers, stationed in the little town, invaded his
house and beat his father unmercifully, almost crippled him: they
knocked down his mother, killed a little brother of his, and he
himself, in the very depth of a winter night, dressed in a little
shirt and coat, made his escape to a deserted barn, where he passed
the whole night. He was nearly frozen when found in the morning,
crouching in a corner of the barn, shivering with fear and cold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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