Psychology and parenthoodBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Science
Psychology and parenthood
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Child psychology
Paralysis, muscular contractures, symptoms mimicking tuberculosis,
kidney disease, and other dread organic maladies, are also recognised
to-day as possible after-effects, through the power of subconscious
mental action, of happenings that give rise to a profound feeling of
fear. Sometimes more than one symptom is thus occasioned in the same
patient. Again, for the purpose of concrete illustration, I cite a
typical case from real life—the case of a Pole, a man of twenty-five,
treated for a weird combination of mental and physical disturbances.
Physically, he suffered from severe and frequent attacks of headache,
setting in gradually, and preceded by a feeling of depression and
dizziness. During the attacks his body became cold, his head throbbed
violently, he shivered incessantly. To keep warm, he was obliged to
wrap himself in many blankets. Mentally, he was tormented by many
phobias. He was afraid of closed places, and still more afraid of being
obliged to remain alone, especially at night. He had a morbid fear of
the dead, and would on no account enter a room with a corpse in it or
attend a funeral. Nothing could induce him to visit a cemetery, even in
company with other people. Fear of dogs was also a conspicuous feature
of his case, as was fear of fire.
Through psychological exploration of his subconsciousness, every one
of these symptoms was traced to actual experiences that had given him
great emotional shocks, and in almost every instance to experiences
that had occurred in his childhood. The fear of dogs had its origin in
an exciting episode he had had with some dogs when he was only three.
The pyrophobia was connected with the fact that at four years of age he
had been hastily carried from a burning building, shivering with fright
and cold, into the open air of a frosty night. His dread of cemeteries
and of the dead was rooted in a subconscious recollection of terrors
inspired in him, while a child, by hearing “all kinds of ghost stories
and tales of wandering lost souls, and of spirits of dead people
hovering about churchyards.”
In addition to this, his mother, a very superstitious woman, when he
was nine, placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a
“cure” for some trifling ailment. Hence his special fear of corpses.
As to the headaches and the sensations of cold, they were the result
partly of this “dead hand” memory, and partly of the memory of a still
more severe experience, occurring at about the same time, when he was
forced to spend an entire night in a barn in mid-winter, to escape a
party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father unmercifully and
had killed one of his little brothers. His fear of closed spaces and
his fear of being alone were associated with the same experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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