d dazed or dreamy. With this restlessness she
appeared at times "a little apprehensive." Although she spoke slowly,
with initial difficulty she answered quite a number of questions. Her
larval perplexity was evidenced by the doubt expressed in a good many of
her utterances, such as, "Have I done something?" "Do people want
something?" "I have done damage to the city, didn't I?" When asked what
she had done, she said, "I don't know." She asked the physician, "Are
you my brother?" and when questioned for her orientation said, "Is not
this a hospital?" The atmosphere of perplexity also colored the
information which she did recall correctly; for instance, when asked her
address, she said, "Didn't I live at ----?" then giving the address
correctly.
As stated in Chapter V dealing with the ideational content of stupor,
one has to look on the delusions of patients as symptoms subject to
analysis and classification just as truly as the variations in mood or
intellectual processes, in fact they should be subject to the same
correlation as are the mental anomalies which are usually studied,
particularly if we are to understand these psychoses as a whole. Let us,
therefore, consider the death ideas in the three cases studied in this
chapter. We find that, as in the ordinary stupors, there are delusions
of death, also of mutual death (with the father), but there is a
tendency to elaboration so that the death is only part of a larger
OEdipus drama, the rest of which is usually lacking in stupors. Here
it is present. So we have thoughts of the death of the mother or
husband, another rival, considerable preoccupation with Heaven, and also
erotic fancies.
We find in manic-depressive insanity a tendency for more or less
specific ideational contents with different types of the psychoses.[8]
For example, there are religious and erotic fancies or ambitious schemes
dominating the thoughts of manic patients, fears of aggression and
injury met with in anxiety cases, and so on. In stupors, death seems to
be a state of non-existence with other meanings lacking or only hinted
at occasionally. When it tends to be elaborated, it leads over to
formulations suggesting personal attachments and emotional outlet, and
then we are apt to find interruptions of the pure stupor picture. For
example, Charlotte W. (Case 12), whose case has been described, thought
much about being in Heaven and ended with a hypomanic state. Atypical
symptoms appear just as
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