Similarly, I had patients who suffered from tuberculosis, from asthma, from heart trouble, and from all kinds of intestinal affections which specially abound in psychopathic cases. All such cases can be clearly traced to various somatic symptoms based on the fear instinct. The etiology is fear, the arousal and development of the fear instinct in respect to the special symptom complex.
A patient, aged twenty-six years, suffered from agoraphobia at various intervals. As a child of nine years, he was attacked by rough boys. He freed himself and ran in great terror. The boys threatened him with another “licking” when he appeared again on the street. He was afraid to go out for several weeks. The parents forced him to go and buy some things. Living in a rough neighborhood, on account of his father’s circumstances, he had been many times subjected to knocks, blows, and assaults by rough boys, until the fear of the open street became fixed into the well known form of agoraphobia.
Another case, that of a lady of thirty-eight years, married, suffers from ailurophobia, or fear of cats. This can be traced to the patient’s early childhood. When she was a child her brothers and sisters went through attacks of diphtheria, which was ascribed to infection caused or transmitted by cats. The patient was specially impressed with the danger from cats. Under such training and suggestion given in early childhood, the patient gradually formed a fear of cats. This fear was still more intensified and became a panic when she was put into a dark room and a cat was let loose on the poor victim by her mischievous companions, who knew of the patient’s fear. When the patient had children of her own, she was still more affected by the fear of cats, on account of the subconscious and conscious fear of the possibility of infection transmitted by cats to her children.
All those cases were investigated and cured by hypnoidal states.
Mr. D., a young man of twenty-five years, was born in Poland. As far as can be ascertained, the parents as well as the brothers and sisters are well. A physical examination of the patient reveals nothing abnormal. There are no sensory, no motor disturbances. He complains of severe headaches, preceded by a feeling of indisposition, depression, vertigo and distress. During the attack there is hyperesthesia to touch, pressure, temperature, and to visual and auditory stimulations. The patient shivers and looks pale. The cold experienced during the attack is so intense that the patient has to wrap himself in many blankets, as if suffering from a malarial paroxysm.
Fears have strong possession of the patient’s mind. He is afraid to remain in a closed place in the daytime and especially at night. When he has to remain alone at night, he is in an agony of fear, and cannot go to sleep. Every passer-by is regarded as a robber or murderer, and he quakes at the least noise. When walking in the house in the dark, he has the feeling as if someone were after him, and occasionally even experiences the hallucination of some one tugging at his coat. He is mortally afraid of the dead and shuns a funeral. The patient has also a fear of dogs, a kynophobia. The fear is irresistible, and is as involuntary as a reflex.
An investigation, by means of the hypnoidal states, brought out of the patient’s subconscious life the following data: When a child of three years, the patient lived with his family in a small village near a large forest infested with wolves. In one of the intermediary states a faint memory, rather to say a vision, struggled up, a vision of wolves and dogs. Some one cried out: “Run, wolves are coming!” Crazed with fear, he ran into the hut and fell fainting on the floor. It turned out to be dogs instead of a pack of wolves. It is that fright in early childhood which has persisted in the subconscious mind, and, having become associated with subsequent experiences of attacks of dogs, has found expression in the patient’s consciousness as an instinctive fear of dogs.
But why was the patient in such abject terror of dead people? This found its answer in the experiences and training of his early life. When a young child, the patient heard all kinds of ghost stories, and tales of wandering lost souls and of spirits of dead people hovering about the churchyard and burial grounds; he heard tales of ghouls and of evil spirits inhabiting deserted places, dwelling in the graves of sinners and the wicked. He listened to stories of haunted houses and of apparitions stalking about in the dark. His social and religious environment has been saturated with the belief in the supernatural, as is usually the case among the superstitious populations of Eastern Europe. We cannot wonder, then, that an impressionable child brought up under such conditions should stand in mortal fear of the supernatural, especially of the dead.
When the patient was about nine years old, his parents noticed some prominences on his right chest. It was suggested to them that the hand of a dead person possessed the property of blighting life and arresting all growth, and would, therefore, prove a “powerful medicine” for undesirable growths. It happened that an old woman in the neighborhood died. The little boy was taken into the room where the dead body was lying, and the cold hand of the corpse was put on the child’s naked chest. The little fellow fainted away in terror. The fear of dead people became subconsciously fixed, and manifested itself as an insistent fear of the dead, and, in fact, of anything connected with the dead and the world of spirits.
The patient had hardly recovered from the shock of the “dead hand,” when he had to pass through a still more severe experience. A party of drunken soldiers, stationed in the little town, invaded his house and beat his father unmercifully, almost crippled him: they knocked down his mother, killed a little brother of his, and he himself, in the very depth of a winter night, dressed in a little shirt and coat, made his escape to a deserted barn, where he passed the whole night. He was nearly frozen when found in the morning, crouching in a corner of the barn, shivering with fear and cold.