Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

It is the more desirable since, as investigation is daily revealing more and more clearly, abnormal dread is not the only malady resulting from a fear-occasioning event. Where one man, as the result of a sudden fright, may in course of time become a phobiac, another may develop symptoms, not of mental trouble, but of bodily disease. A most instructive instance is afforded by the experiences of a young Russian immigrant in this country who had the good fortune to come under the observation of those two eminent specialists in the treatment of mentally-caused disorders, Doctors Morton Prince and Boris Sidis.

The trouble for which this young man sought relief was, to all appearance, purely physical. It consisted of periodic convulsive attacks that racked the right half of his body, and had led to a diagnosis of epilepsy. Since sundry delicate symptoms characteristic of epilepsy were absent, however, the specialists, after a careful study of the case, came to the conclusion that the spasms from which their patient suffered might involve no true organic disease, and might be nothing more than the outward manifestation of some deep-seated psychical disturbance. With this possibility in mind they questioned him both in the normal waking state and in hypnosis, and brought to light some interesting facts.

The first attack, he told them, had set in five years before, when he was sixteen years old and living in Russia. After returning from a dance one evening, he went back to look for a ring lost by the young lady whom he had escorted home. It was past midnight, and his way lay over a country road by a cemetery. Nearing the cemetery, he thought he heard somebody or something running after him. He turned to flee, fell, and lost consciousness. He still was unconscious when found on the road. After he had been brought to, it was seen that he was afflicted with a spasmodic, uncontrollable shaking of the right side, involving his head, arm, and leg. This lasted almost a week, when he seemed as well as ever. But every year thereafter, at about the same time, he had had an attack similar in all respects to the first one, excepting only that he did not become unconscious.

He further declared, while in the hypnotic state, that throughout the period of the attacks he had unpleasant dreams, all relating to the fright and fall of five years before. In these dreams he lived over and over again the experience from which his trouble dated.

“I find myself,” said he, “on the lonely road in my little native town. I am hurrying along the road near the cemetery. It is very dark. I imagine somebody—a robber, or a ghost—is running after me. I become frightened, call for help, and fall. Then I wake up with a start, and remember nothing about the dream. I no longer am afraid, but I have these terrible spasms.”

It was even found possible to produce the convulsive attacks experimentally by simply reminding him, while hypnotised, of the incident on the road. To Doctors Prince and Sidis it now seemed certain that his malady was due to nothing else than the persistence of an intensely vivid subconscious memory-image of the fright he had experienced; and that he would no longer be troubled by it if the memory-image were destroyed by psychotherapeutic treatment. Suggestions to this effect were accordingly given him, when awake as well as when hypnotised. The outcome was all that could be desired, for a speedy and permanent cure was brought about.

Paralysis, muscular contractures, symptoms mimicking tuberculosis, kidney disease, and other dread organic maladies, are also recognised to-day as possible after-effects, through the power of subconscious mental action, of happenings that give rise to a profound feeling of fear. Sometimes more than one symptom is thus occasioned in the same patient. Again, for the purpose of concrete illustration, I cite a typical case from real life—the case of a Pole, a man of twenty-five, treated for a weird combination of mental and physical disturbances.

Physically, he suffered from severe and frequent attacks of headache, setting in gradually, and preceded by a feeling of depression and dizziness. During the attacks his body became cold, his head throbbed violently, he shivered incessantly. To keep warm, he was obliged to wrap himself in many blankets. Mentally, he was tormented by many phobias. He was afraid of closed places, and still more afraid of being obliged to remain alone, especially at night. He had a morbid fear of the dead, and would on no account enter a room with a corpse in it or attend a funeral. Nothing could induce him to visit a cemetery, even in company with other people. Fear of dogs was also a conspicuous feature of his case, as was fear of fire.

Through psychological exploration of his subconsciousness, every one of these symptoms was traced to actual experiences that had given him great emotional shocks, and in almost every instance to experiences that had occurred in his childhood. The fear of dogs had its origin in an exciting episode he had had with some dogs when he was only three. The pyrophobia was connected with the fact that at four years of age he had been hastily carried from a burning building, shivering with fright and cold, into the open air of a frosty night. His dread of cemeteries and of the dead was rooted in a subconscious recollection of terrors inspired in him, while a child, by hearing “all kinds of ghost stories and tales of wandering lost souls, and of spirits of dead people hovering about churchyards.”

In addition to this, his mother, a very superstitious woman, when he was nine, placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a “cure” for some trifling ailment. Hence his special fear of corpses. As to the headaches and the sensations of cold, they were the result partly of this “dead hand” memory, and partly of the memory of a still more severe experience, occurring at about the same time, when he was forced to spend an entire night in a barn in mid-winter, to escape a party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father unmercifully and had killed one of his little brothers. His fear of closed spaces and his fear of being alone were associated with the same experience.