Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study — John Shaqi
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
The patient herself had been as the youngest child the spoiled darling
of both parents and until her seventh year had been taken by them into
their bed in the morning to play. In her first three years she always
slept between the parents, preferably on the inner side of one of the
two beds and with her legs spread, so that, in her mother's words: "One
foot belongs to me and one to her father!" She was most strongly drawn,
however, to the mother, toward whom at an early age she was sexually
stimulated, already in her first year, if her statements can be relied
upon, when she sat upon her mother's lap while nursing.
The little one early learned also that, when one is sick, one receives
new playthings and especially much petting and tenderness, on account of
which she often pretended to be sick purposely or she phantasied about
dark forms and ugly faces, which of course she never saw, except to
compel the mother to stay with her and show her special love and
tenderness. Already in her second year she would go to bed most
dutifully, "right gladly" to please father and mother and gain sexual
pleasure thereby. The father then let her ride on his knee, stroked her
upon her buttocks and kissed her passionately upon the lips. The desire
after the mother became the stronger. When the latter had lain down and
the little one had been good, then the child would creep to the mother
under the feather bed and snuggle close to her body ("wind herself fast
like a serpent"). The mother's firm body gave her extraordinary
pleasure, yes, not infrequently it led to the expulsion of a secretion
from the cervix uteri. ("The good comes," as she expressed it.) I
mention convulsive attacks and enuresis nocturna, as pathological
affections of her childhood which belong to my theme. The patient had in
fact suffered in her first year a concussion of the brain, through being
thrown against a brick wall, with organic eclamptic attacks as a result.
The great love which she had experienced because of this led her also
later to imitate those attacks hysterically. In the fourth year, for
example, when she had to sleep in a child's crib, no longer between the
beloved parents, she immediately produced attacks of anxiety in which
she saw ugly faces and witches as in the beginning of the eclamptic
convulsions. Thereupon the frightened mother took her again into her own
bed. Later also she often began to moan and fret until the mother would
take her in her arms to ward off the threatened attacks, and thus she
could stimulate herself to her heart's content. As she reports, at the
height of the orgasm she expelled a secretion, her body began to writhe
convulsively, her face became red as fire, her eyes rolled about and she
almost lost herself in her great pleasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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