One typical case reported to me by a Boston physician who personally considers the sleeping sickness as being “unquestionably an acute organic disease of the cerebro-spinal system” has all the earmarks of a neurotic affection:
“The patient, a middle aged woman lost a child she loved dearly one year and a half before the onset of the disease. The circumstances of the child’s death were particularly sad as the mother was not allowed to visit the little sufferer at the hospital on account of the contagious character of his disease. She also felt disturbing doubts as to the competence of the first physician who attended her child.
“She had been ‘nervous and run down’ since the child’s death. She is married to a cripple twenty years her senior. She had to go to work in order to help support the household and to live with relatives of her husband’s who did not contribute to the pleasantness of her home life.”
Have we not here all the environmental conditions which would drive a neurotic to withdraw his attention from reality through a protracted period of sleep?
From the fact that I have instituted a comparison between sleep and the sleeping sickness, the reader should not draw the conclusion that I attribute to sleep any neurotic character.
Sleep is a compromise, as I shall show later, when discussing dream life, between what the human animal was meant to do and what it can do in reality.
The neurosis, also is a compromise, but it is a compromise that fails, while sleep is a compromise which is successful, beneficial and acceptable to all.