Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
CASE 2. I introduce here a second case, in which to be sure the
influence of the moon represented only an episode and therefore received
also but a brief analysis. It is that of a twenty-eight year old
forester, who came under psychoanalytic treatment on account of severe
hysterical cardiac distress. The cause of this was a damming up of his
feelings toward his mother, for whom he longed in the unconscious. His
condition of anxiety broke out when he went to live with his mother
after the death of his father and slept in the next room. He admitted
that his father drank. Every Sunday he was somewhat drunk. Likewise the
mother, who kept a public house, was in no way disinclined toward
alcohol. He himself had consumed more beer especially in his high school
days than was good for him. I would emphasize in his sexual life, as
belonging to our theme, his strong urethral erotic, which made him a bed
wetter in childhood, led in later years to frequent micturition at night
and caused a serious dysuria psychica. His muscle erotic finally drove
him to the calling of a forester.
Only the portions of his psychoanalysis, which lasted for eight weeks,
which have to do with his sleep activities and his response to the moon
will be brought forward. Thus he relates at one time: "At thirteen years
old, when I was in a lodging house kept by a woman, I arose one morning
with the dark suspicion that I had done something in the night. What I
did not remember. I merely felt stupefied. Suddenly the boys who slept
with me began to laugh, for from under my bed ran a stream of urine. In
the night the full moon had shone upon my bed. We fellows had no vessel
there but had to go outside, which with my frequent need for urination
during the night was very unpleasant. Now there stood under my bed a
square box for hats and neckties, which I, as I got up in the night half
intoxicated with sleep, had taken for a chamber and I had urinated in
it. This was repeated. Another time, also at full moon, I wet a
colleague's shoe. They all said that I must be a little loony. When the
full moon came, I was always afraid that I might do this again, an
anxiety which remained long with me. I never dared sleep, for example,
so that the full moon could shine directly upon me. Yes; still
something else. Two or three years later the following happened, only I
do not know whether there was moonlight. I was sleeping with several
colleagues in a room adjoining that of the lodging house keepers, the
man and his wife. I must have gone into them at night and done something
sexual. Either I wished to climb into bed with the wife or I had
masturbated, I do not know which. I had at any rate the next day the
suspicion that something of the kind had happened. The landlord and
landlady laughed so oddly, but they said nothing to me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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