The dominant note in the young girl's character is her cowardice;
she is afraid of everything. Every evening before the return of her
father she repeatedly looks into the corridor to see that no one is
there; as soon as her parent arrives, she locks the door behind him
hurriedly to prevent any one else appearing; every now and then in
her fear of a footstep she listens at the door, and it is this
gesture, this attitude of listening, that has degenerated into a
tic which no amount of remonstrance or derision seems to affect.
Phobias such as these are associated with an evident tendency to
melancholia and hypochondriasis. The majority of our patients are
ridiculously preoccupied with the state of their health; the
extraordinarily introspective nature of their minds is manifest in their
meticulous observation, their laborious analysis of their most trifling
sensations, the zeal with which they devise the most complex
explanation for their simplest symptom, usually for the sake of making
the prognosis seem more grave.
At the other pole from these silly fears and dislikes we meet with
various absurd predilections and meaningless attractions: one can sit
only on a certain seat, sleep only in a certain bed; another cannot
enter a room except by a particular door; a third will make a long
detour to pass along a certain street; in this street he will always
walk on the same side, and lengthen or shorten his stride to step always
on the same flagstones. We are acquainted with the history of a wretched
commissionaire who could not go an errand in Paris without starting from
the Place Clichy, and the interminable twists and turns on his route can
be imagined when his duty took him from Montrouge to the Bastille.
Akin to the conditions we have been enumerating is an exaggerated love
of order, somewhat unexpected in those whose mental disarray is often
extreme. Some cannot sleep without previously arranging their clothes in
an unvarying plan. One of Guinon's patients contrived to have one half
of the objects in front of him to his right, and the other half to his
left. In the case of a little nine-year-old hydrocephalic child with
tics and echolalia, Noir[26] makes the following remarks:
The fundamental element in the child's character is an overweening
vanity coupled with an excessive orderliness. Her desire of
personal ornament is such that at one time she is lost in
admiration of a new dress, at another, she is decking herself out
with old pieces of tarletan. When going to bed she folds her
clothes in the same exact order each evening. Her self-conceit
makes her furiously jealous of the attention paid to any other
patient in her presence.
A similar mental state has been observed by Noir in other
hydrocephalics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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