his appearance at the place that captain roused the man’s suspicions. He
found that his wife gave the fellow the best cup of coffee, that she was
altogether too friendly with him, and that she showered upon him all
sorts of pleasant little courtesies. His wife explained to him that this
captain bought of them all the supplies for his company and was the
means of bringing them important business, and that she was friendly
only for business reasons, but that their relations had never trespassed
the limits of propriety. But he kept collecting indications of her
unfaithfulness. Among the proofs he found the butt of a cigarette in his
wife’s room. He questioned her closely and asked the officer’s orderly
to bring him a cigarette from his master’s case, claiming those
cigarettes had such a pleasant aroma he wanted to try one. He thus
secured a cigarette and found that it bore an identical mark. The fact
was he smoked the same brand of cigarettes, but he thought he discovered
a certain stripe which the other cigarettes did not have (I could not
detect the stripe in question). His other proofs were of a like
character. This time he had a terrible quarrel with his wife,—much more
serious than the previous ordeal. Trouble upon trouble followed after
that. He suspected his clerks and dismissed them one after another about
every two weeks. Every one was his wife’s lover. Finally he rushed at
his wife, in a fit of anger, to beat her, and began choking her. The
following day the woman left him, went to live with her sister, and
started proceedings for divorce. She claimed her husband was not normal
and he voluntarily came to Vienna to place himself under my observation.
First I turned my attention to his jealousy and I tried carefully to
correct that. He acknowledged some points, here and there, showed some
insight into his condition, and was not shocked when I refused to give
him a certificate of good health. Meanwhile he had removed his beard to
give himself a younger appearance. That change was not necessary as he
was young-looking enough, but it was part of the outbreak of his
feminine tendencies. He also had a string of dreams in which he was a
woman. Usually he rehearsed the old jealousy scenes and he repeatedly
killed his wife in his dreams.
Thus he dreamed:
_I am with my wife in an old room but dressed as a woman, so as not to
be recognized. My wife steps out of the room, it was very dark. The
captain comes into the room and wants to touch me under the dress. But
some one calls him out of the room. I jump at my wife, enraged: that is
the kind of a h—— you are. Now I know everything about you ... and I
stick a knife in her throat._
In another dream he lies hidden under the bed and feels the swaying
motion of coitus above. It was very characteristic that after quarrels
and scenes of violence he craved intercourse with his wife and his
_libido_ was much stronger ... clearly on account of the sadistic
excitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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