Only the portions of his psychoanalysis, which lasted for eight weeks, which have to do with his sleep activities and his response to the moon will be brought forward. Thus he relates at one time: “At thirteen years old, when I was in a lodging house kept by a woman, I arose one morning with the dark suspicion that I had done something in the night. What I did not remember. I merely felt stupefied. Suddenly the boys who slept with me began to laugh, for from under my bed ran a stream of urine. In the night the full moon had shone upon my bed. We fellows had no vessel there but had to go outside, which with my frequent need for urination during the night was very unpleasant. Now there stood under my bed a square box for hats and neckties, which I, as I got up in the night half intoxicated with sleep, had taken for a chamber and I had urinated in it. This was repeated. Another time, also at full moon, I wet a colleague's shoe. They all said that I must be a little loony. When the full moon came, I was always afraid that I might do this again, an anxiety which remained long with me. I never dared sleep, for example, so that the full moon could shine directly upon me. Yes; still something else. Two or three years later the following happened, only I do not know whether there was moonlight. I was sleeping with several colleagues in a room adjoining that of the lodging house keepers, the man and his wife. I must have gone into them at night and done something sexual. Either I wished to climb into bed with the wife or I had masturbated, I do not know which. I had at any rate the next day the suspicion that something of the kind had happened. The landlord and landlady laughed so oddly, but they said nothing to me.”
“Did your mother perhaps in your childhood come to look after you with the light?”—“Yes; that is so. My mother always stayed up for a long time and came in regularly late at night with the light to go to bed. My father was obliged to go early to bed because of his work and had to get up at midnight, when he always made a light.” Here he suddenly broke off: “Perhaps it is for this reason that I have an anxiety in an entirely dark room. If there is not at least a bit of light I can not perform coitus.”—“How is that?”—“I have remonstrated rather seriously with myself that the sexual act could be performed only with a light.”—Then at a later hour of analysis: “When my father went away at night, I came repeatedly into my mother's bed. I lay down in my father's bed, also in a certain measure put myself into his place.”—“Did your mother call you, or did you come of yourself?”—“I believe that my mother invited me to her. Now something occurs to me: The moonlight awoke me as my father woke me when he struck a light as he was going out. Then it was time to go into bed with my mother, for the father was gone, which always gave me a feeling of reassurance.”—“Yes, when he was gone he could do nothing more to the mother. And then you could take his place with her.”
Two months later came the following to supplement this: “Already in the grammar school I was always afraid someone might attack me in the night, because of which I always double locked the room and looked under the bed and in every chest. In childhood Mother came in fact to look after me and set me on the chamber.”—“Then your neurotic anxiety presumably signifies the opposite, the wish that your mother shall come to you again.”—“Or rather, I bolt the door so that my father cannot come to my mother. I followed in this also a command of my mother, ‘Lock yourself in well!’ She always had a fear of burglars. Now even since I have been living with my mother she has said to me more than once, that I should lock myself in well. But I thought to myself, ‘What, bolt myself in!’”—“That would mean also that if the mother wants to come, only she should come.”—“That is just what I thought to myself, when Mother woke me early, that she need not knock but come right in. In the daytime I lay in my mother's bed because her room was warmer than mine. I was feeling very wretchedly at that time and my mother said in the evening, ‘Stay there where you are; I will sleep in the little room next. Leave the door open.’ In the night I know I was very restless.”—“Did you not perhaps have the wish that your mother should look at her sick child in the night, as she once did when you were younger?”—“Yes, to be sure. This wish pursued me and therefore I slept badly. I would have carried the thing out further if my dysuria had not hindered me. If I had arisen in the night or the morning, then Mother would at once have heard me in her light sleep and I would not have been able to urinate. One time I crept out of bed very quietly so that she did not hear me, and yet it held back a long time until I couldn't stand it any longer. It was just the same at the time when I was in the grammar and the high school, if Mother asked me to sleep near her and Father was not there. Then also I could urinate only with great difficulty. And now when I was living with my mother, I had the most severe excited attacks. There was no other reason for I was neither a loafer nor a drunkard. I have laid myself down in my mother's bed and been unwilling to get out. That is very significant. And if at any time I went away from home I at once felt so miserable that I must go back. I was immediately better when once there.”
This case, when we consider it, is plain in its relationships. The excessive love for the mother is a decisive factor as well as the desire to play the rôle of the father with her. Therefore the fear of burglars at night, behind which hides in part the anxiety that the father would have sexual relations with the mother and in part the wish that the latter might herself come to him. Joined to this is the desire for all sorts of infantile experiences, such as the mother's placing him every night upon the chamber because of his bed wetting. In the later repression the pleasure in the enuresis as well as in the being taken up by the mother becomes a dysuria psychica. Naturally to the urethral eroticist in childhood, and also later unconsciously, micturition is analogous to the sexual act. In puberty the moonlight awakens him as in childhood the mother's light or that of the father. So on the one hand the memory of the former is awakened, who with the light in her hand reminded him to go to the chamber,[13] and on the other hand the memory of the going out of the father, which was a signal to him to go to his mother. He arises and carries out with her symbolically the sexual act, for he urinates into a vaginal symbol (box or shoe-vagina). Also the fact that he got up once by the light of the full moon and wanted to climb into the bed of the landlady, likewise a mother substitute, is all of a piece. This case here before us, as may be seen, confirms what the first has already taught us.
Cases 3, 4, and 5.—I wish to give further a brief report of three cases of walking by moonlight, which I regret to say I could only briefly outline in passing, not being able to submit them to an exhaustive analysis. In everything they confirm every detail of our previous conclusions.
The first case is that of an unmarried woman of twenty-eight, who walked in her sleep first in her sixth year and the second time when she was nine years old. “I got up when the full moon was shining, climbed over a chair upon the piano and intended to go to the window to unfasten it. Just then my father awoke and struck me hard on my buttocks, upon which I went back and again fell asleep. I often arose, went to each bed, that of the parents and those of the brothers and sisters, looked at them and went back again. Between sixteen and seventeen years old, when my periods first occurred, the sleep walking stopped.” She adds later: “I frequently as a child spoke out in my sleep. My nose began to bleed when I was walking on the street and the sun shone upon me. After this the sleep walking improved. I always clung affectionately to my parents and brothers and sisters, and never received a blow except in that one instance by my father.”—“Which you took rather as a caress, than as a blow for punishment.”
In this case also the sleep walker plays sometimes the rôle of the mother, who satisfies herself that her dear ones are asleep. Moreover a period of talking in the sleep precedes the wandering by moonlight. It is noteworthy that the sleep walking is intercepted by a caressing blow from the father and ceases altogether when menstruation sets in. Also earlier nosebleed had a beneficial effect.
The second case is that of a forty-year-old hysteric, who in her marriage remained completely anesthetic sexually, although her husband was thoroughly sympathetic to her and very potent. Her father's favorite child, she strove in vain in early childhood for the affection of the mother, who on her part also suffered severely from hysteria, with screaming fits, incessant tremor of the head and hands and a host of nervous afflictions. This mother's daughters had all of them always an extraordinary passion for muscular activity with apparently great satisfaction in it. They were among other things distinguished swimmers and enthusiastic dancers. My patient besides could never tire of walking for hours at a time.
In our discussion she related the following to me concerning her sleep walking: “I got up once in the night when I was about ten years old. I had dreamed that I was playing the piano. I found myself however not in bed but standing between a chest and a desk scratching upon the latter with my nails, as if playing the piano, which finally awoke me. There was also a paper basket there which either I had stepped over or there was a space through which I could slip, at any rate the way there was not quite free. I stood in this narrow space and dreamed I was playing the piano. Suddenly I heard my mother's voice, ‘Mizzi, where are you?’ She called me several times before I finally awoke. Without it was not yet growing daylight, but the moon shone brightly within. I recollected myself immediately, realizing where I was, and went back to bed. I told my mother, as an excuse, that I had to go to the chamber.” “Had you at that time a great desire to play the piano?”—“Three years later it made me sick that I had not had to learn, but then I had as yet no desire for music. We had no piano at that time. Yet among my earliest memories is that of the way in which my mother played the piano. As a woman I wished that I could express my joy and sorrow in music. I would mention further that my brother and my uncle on the mother's side[14] are both sleep walkers. The former always wants to come into my bed in the night when he walks in his sleep. I must emphasize that he is especially fond of me.
“The following often happened to me after I was married but never in my maidenhood. I awoke in the night, sat up in bed and did not know what was the matter with me. I could not think consciously, I was quite incapable of thought. I knew neither where I was nor what was happening to me; I could remember nothing. I did not know whether I was Jew or Christian, man or woman, a human being or a beast, only stared straight ahead into the next room, at a point of light. That was the only thing that appeared clear to me. I held myself to it to regain clearness. I always said to myself: ‘What, what then? Where, how and why?’ My powers of thought went no further. I was like a newborn child. I stared fixedly at this point of light because I unconsciously thought I would obtain clearness there for everywhere else it was dark. This lasted for a long time until through the light I could distinguish what it was that caused the light. It was from a street lamp, so apparently before midnight, and the lamp lighted a bit of the wall in the next room. After I had said to myself for a long time ‘What, what?’ and stared straight at that light, I learned gradually to distinguish what made the light, that is to recognize, That there above, is a bit of lamplight; again after some time; That is my lamp. Upon this I recollected my home and then for the first time everything else. When I had made out the outlines of things around me, then returned the consciousness that I was a human being and was married. Of all that I had not before been aware. I do not remember that I had dreamed anything before this came on, or that anything had excited me, nor that anything special had happened beforehand. Beside nothing like it has ever happened to me when I have been greatly excited. At the most, after my marriage I led a life of strain. I was tied to a shop which was damp, unwholesome and full of bad air, and I am a friend of fresh air. I suffered very much mentally under these conditions, because I love light and air.”—“Did you think that you were indeed not a human being?”—“No; only that with God's help I would endure this life.” I will add here that her second sister also manifested similar disturbances of consciousness.