VIII.[5] SCHIZOPHRENOSES
(DEMENTIA PRAECOX GROUP)
[5] VII. Geriopsychoses (senile-senescent group) not represented in war cases (see page).
The Sister’s ear boxed for blow to a German soldier’s pride: Diagnosis PSYCHOPATHIC CONSTITUTION! A true psychosis develops: hate of Prussia and the Junkertum: Diagnosis, DEMENTIA PRAECOX!!
Case 147. (Bonhoeffer.)
A sick soldier in a military hospital kept complaining of being waked up too early, and of poor food. His reactions looked like the irritable weakness of a psychopath. One day he went into a room where a woman was being examined, without knocking. When ordered out, he boxed the Sister’s ear.
He said himself, on transfer to the psychiatric clinic, that he had always been quarrelsome as a child with his brothers and sisters, subject to fainting spells, and poor and stubborn in military service,—all of which seemed to clinch the diagnosis of psychopathic constitution.
But he seemed to show a decided lack of autocritique. About boxing the Sister’s ear on her saying “Please go out,”—his idea was that he could not let a thing like that happen to him,—a German soldier and a patient! Moreover, “It should not be thought that perhaps I had a love affair with her! There was a cynicism about her.” The Sister had a strong sex impulse, he could see that by her nose: she was, so to speak, “hypochondriacal.” Both in speech and writing he used stilted phrases. The ego at last swelled to the point of his saying that he was an inhabitant of the World and hated Prussia and Prussian Junkertum.
Then came unmotivated states of excitement, with pressure of speech and motion, and eventually negativism. Accordingly, the diagnosis hebephrenia finally replaced that of psychopathic constitution.
Dementia praecox, arrested as spy.