“Nothing that I can remember, except that I went to a friend’s funeral.”
“The funeral of a very dear friend?”
“Not exactly—just a friend.”
“But that should not have had such a disturbing effect on your mind. Did anything happen at the funeral?”
“I saw a woman there whose eyes frightened me.”
“And why did they frighten you?”
“Because they reminded me of a preacher I used to know when I was a little girl. He was a revivalist, and I always thought he was crazy. I went to his meetings, and got terribly worked up, and it frightened me very much. I thought I would go crazy too, just like the preacher.”
To Doctor Coriat it seemed unnecessary to ask any more questions. As he saw it, the haunting dread of insanity was nothing but the continuation in consciousness of the forgotten memory of the childhood fright, revived by subconscious association of the woman at the funeral with the preacher whose rabid exhortations had inspired the patient with such terror. On this theory he utilised the resources of medical psychology to deprive the baneful memory-image of its power to harm, and soon had the satisfaction of being able to record a perfect cure.
In another case, successfully treated by Doctor Sidis, the subconscious persistence of childhood fears actually threatened a young woman with perhaps lifelong confinement in an asylum for the insane. She had, in fact, been placed in a New York hospital for observation, and it was there that Doctor Sidis treated her. According to her relatives, who did not doubt that she had lost her reason, she suffered from strange hallucinations, particularly of constantly hearing voices call to her, and of being killed. She even imagined at times that she was dead, and would lie in a cataleptic condition, rigidly motionless. At other times she complained of a painful stiffness in her arms, and of difficulty in walking.
Testing her psychologically, Doctor Sidis found cause for thinking that her trouble was hysterical rather than a true insanity involving brain lesions, and he promptly questioned her relatives regarding her previous history. She had had, he learned, some exceedingly unpleasant experiences with a brother-in-law, a rough, brutal fellow, but they did not seem adequate to account for her various symptoms. These, he suspected, had their roots farther back in her life, and, although she professed a total inability to recall any severe fright or worry other than those associated with her brother-in-law, he remained unshaken in his suspicion.