“And of what, pray, are you afraid?” the physician asked.
“I am afraid of cholera.”
“Is that all you are afraid of?”
“But surely it is quite enough.”
Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone:
“This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown much worse. She will scarcely eat anything, for fear of catching cholera. It is difficult to persuade her to stir from the house. She seems to think the air is full of cholera germs. She sees cholera in everything. Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?”
“Leave her here a few days,” said Doctor Janet, “and I can tell you better then.”
Psychopathologists have invented some delicate tests for discriminating infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of medical knowledge is quite incurable, and functional mental troubles due to dissociation. Applying these, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her “phobia,” or irrational fear, was due to some forgotten shock connected with the disease cholera.
But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort. He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotism, when it is possible to use it, is an unrivaled agency for recovering lost memories. Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the normal, waking state. It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable.