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 6.--I add here three autobiographical reports, which I have
gathered from literature. The first originates with the famous anatomist
and physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach, who from his tenth to his
thirtieth year had occasional attacks of moon walking, although he
apparently "enjoyed the most perfect health." "I have during these
periods," he himself relates, "undertaken actions which I had to
recognize as mine, merely because they could have been carried out by no
one else. Thus one day it was incomprehensible to me why I had on no
shirt when I awoke, and it remained so in spite of my utmost efforts to
recollect myself, until the shirt was found in another room rolled
together under a press. In my twenty-ninth year I was awakened from a
night wandering by the question, What did I want? and then the
consciousness of the somnambulistic state passed over in part to the
awaking. First I found the question strange, but since I thought the
reason for it would become plain, I need not betray it. Immediately,
however, as I began to waken, I asked myself in what that consisted and,
now that the somnambulistic state was over, the answer must be due me."
One cannot help finding this self revelation exceedingly interesting.
The hiding of the shirt, although the affair is so incompletely
reported, especially in its motivation, points unmistakably at least to
exhibitionism. The second sleep walking appears much more difficult of
explanation. In this Burdach sought plainly a definite goal, which
seemed so clear and transparent to him that he could not at all
understand why anyone should question him about it. If we consider that
his first thought on waking was that he need not betray this purpose,
that moreover there enters at once a repression and causes him
completely to forget it, there remains then no other possibility than
that we have to do with a strongly forbidden wish, which the conscious
censor will not allow to pass. It is easy to conceive a sexual
motivation in this second instance if we remember that in the first
sleep walking something sexual surely took place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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