connect them more with actual life, or that the primitive
character is lost and the ideas take on a more depressive character with
a depressive affect. A few words should be added in regard to the
peculiar ideas that she or her husband or her child had to pick out her
eyes (or her brain). It is probable that this idea belongs to the motif
of sacrifice (the _Opfer motiv_ of Jung) into which we need not enter
further, except to say that in this instance it was plainly connected,
like some of the other ideas just spoken of, with the real situation of
her life (husband, children).

It will now be necessary to examine the earlier state of Charlotte W.
The condition preceding the stupor set in with pre-occupation, slow talk
and slight distress. During the time she asked to be given one more
chance, she said to the husband she would not see him again. Then
followed a day when she was very slow and with moaning said she was
going to be put into a dark hole. Again on the next, when speaking more
freely, she begged to be saved from the electric chair, and also said,
"Don't kill me, make me true to my husband," etc. [Again the connection
with real life!] We see here the idea of death and especially an idea
pertaining to the rebirth motif in a setting of distress and slowness,
as an introduction to the stupor which had in it both of these motifs.
We must leave it undecided whether it is accidental or not that the
distress was associated with more slowness (i.e., more marked stupor
traits) when she spoke of the dark hole than when she spoke of the
electric chair or death. But what interests us is that distress and
reduction of activity (not sadness and reduction of activity, which
seems as a rule to have a different content) are here associated with
ideas seen in stupor but formulated as prospective dangers. We know from
experience that we often find associated with the fear of dying
considerable freedom of action, and we see at times in involution states
conditions with freedom of motion and marked anxiety, whereas the ideas
seem to belong to the motif of rebirth; e.g., the fear of being boiled
in a tank.[A]

In this connection, however, two other cases should be taken up which
show a condition which reminds one somewhat of that we have just
discussed, but in which the rebirth motif appeared, not as prospective,
but, as in the stupor, as an actual situation. At the same time this
situation was not passively accepted but conceived