Nervous ills, their cause and cure

by Boris Sidis

From that time on the headaches manifested themselves in full severity, with hyperesthesia and death-like paleness and intense cold of the body. The early cultivation of the fear instinct resulted in a neurosis with its recurrent states.

Another patient is a man of thirty years; his family history is good. He is physically well developed, a well known professor of physics in one of the foremost institutions in this country. He suffers from attacks of loss of personality. The attack is of a periodical character, coming on at intervals of two weeks, occasionally disappearing for a few months, then reasserting itself with renewed energy and vigor. During the attack the patient experiences a void, a panic, which is sudden in its onset, like petit mal. The trouble was diagnosed as larval or psychic epilepsy; the man was referred to me by Dr. Morton Prince as an extremely interesting, but puzzling neurological case.

Patient feels that his “self” is gone. He can carry on a conversation or a lecture during the attack, so that no outsider can notice any change in him, but his self is gone, and all that he does and says, even the demonstration of a highly complex problem in integral calculus is gone through in an automatic way. The fury of the attack lasts a few moments, but to him it appears of long duration. He is “beside himself,” as he puts it. He seems to stand beside himself and watch his body, “the other fellow,” as he describes it, carry on the conversation or the lecture. He is “knocked out of his body, which carries on all those complicated mental processes.” For days after he must keep on thinking of the attack, feels scared and miserable, thinking insistently, in great agony, over his awful attack, a recurrent psychoneurotic phrenophobia.

At first the patient could trace this attack only as far back as his seventh year. Later on, earlier experiences of childhood came to light, and then it became clear that the attack developed out of the primitive instinctive fear of early childhood, fear of the unfamiliar, fear of the dark, of the unknown, of the mysterious, fears to which he had been subjected in his tender years.

This state was further reinforced by the early death of his parents, it was hammered in and fixed by hard conditions of life, full of apprehension and anxiety. Life became to the child one big mysterious fear of the unknown. The fear instinct formed the pathological focus of the attack. As the patient puts it: “It is the mystical fear of the attacks which overpowers me.”

With the disintegration of the focus the symptom complex of the attacks disappeared. The patient is in excellent condition, he is doing brilliant work in physics and chemistry and is professor in one of the largest universities in Canada.

I present another case apparently “paranoidal,” a case interesting from our standpoint. The patient is a man of twenty-seven years; his parents are neurotic, religious revivalists. As far back as the age of eight he suffered from agonizing fears of perdition and scares of tortures in hell, impressed on his sensitive, young mind during the revivals. He is very religious, obsessed with the fear of having committed an unpardonable sin. He thinks he is damned to suffer tortures in hell for all eternity. He keeps on testing any chance combinations, and if his guesses turn out correct, he is wrought up to a pitch of excitement and panic. For to him it means a communication coming from an unseen world of unknown mysterious powers. With his condition diagnosed as “paranoidal dementia praecox,” the patient was committed to an insane asylum, from which he was subsequently released.

The attack comes in pulses of brief duration, followed by long periods of brooding, depression, and worry. The primitive fear of pain, of danger and death, and the sense of the mysterious cultivated by his religious training, reached here an extraordinary degree of development. Among the earliest memories that have come up in the hypnoidal state was the memory of a Sunday school teacher, who cultivated in the patient, then but five years of age, those virulent germs which, grown on the soil of the primitive instinctive fear and the highly developed sense of the unknown and the mysterious, have brought forth poisonous fruits which now form the curse of his life. The case is a typical psychoneurotic phrenophobia with its characteristic recurrent states.

“It is difficult,” the patient writes, “to place the beginning of my abnormal fear. It certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant teacher who taught Sunday school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me, if I was not good enough to be saved.”

After a couple of years of persistent treatment by means of the hypnoidal state and by methods of association and disintegration of the active subconscious systems, the patient recovered. He entered a well known medical school and took the foremost rank among the medical students.[9]