“I want you,” Doctor Janet told her, after she had passed into deep hypnosis, “to try to remember whether at any time in your life you saw a person suffering from cholera, or one who had died from cholera.”
“Why, certainly I did,” she promptly replied, shuddering violently.
“When was it?”
“When I was a little girl—fifteen years old.”
“Tell me the circumstances.”
“My mother was very poor. She had to take all sorts of work. Sometimes she nursed sick people, and when they died she got them ready for burial. Once two people in our neighborhood died from cholera, and I helped her with the corpses. They made a frightful sight—one of them, at all events. It was the body of a man, naked, and all blue and green. Oh, frightful, frightful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!”
Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her.
The situation was now perfectly clear to him. Evidently the sight of the corpse, “naked, and all blue and green,” had so profoundly affected the impressionable girl as to cause a severe dissociation whereby all memory of the shocking episode had been blotted out of her consciousness, only to be subconsciously remembered in most minute detail.
To bring about a cure, to free her from the obsessing dread of cholera, it was necessary to remove the gruesome subconscious memory image, and Doctor Janet essayed to do this through suggestions given to her when she was again hypnotized.