degenerate with a weak brain, having a twist, which is the origin of the disorder. For some reason or other the disease has suddenly broken out. It could just as easily have broken out at any other time. Perhaps we should have had to capitulate to these arguments had real psychological analysis not come to our aid. In filling up the certificate required for her removal to the asylum, it transpired that many years ago she had had an affair which terminated; her lover left her with an illegitimate child. Nobody had been told of this. When she was again in love a dilemma arose, and she asked herself, What will this new lover say about it? At first she postponed the marriage, becoming more and more worried, and then the eccentricities began. To understand these we must immerse ourselves in the psychology of a naïve soul. If we have to disclose some painful secret to a beloved person, we try first to strengthen his love in order to obtain beforehand a guarantee of his forgiveness. We do it by flattery or by caresses, or we try to impress the value of our own personality in order to raise it in the eyes of the other. Our patient decked herself out with beautiful feathers, which to her simple taste seemed precious. The wearing of “pince-nez” increases the respect of children even of a mature age. And who does not know people who will have their teeth extracted, out of pure vanity, in order that they may wear a plate to improve their appearance?
After such an operation most people have a slight, nervous reaction, and then everything becomes more difficult to bear. This was, as a matter of fact, just the moment when the catastrophe did occur, in her terror lest her fiancé should break with her when he heard of her previous life. That was the first anxiety-attack. Just as the patient had not acknowledged her secret in all these years, so she now sought to guard it, and shifted the fear in her guilty conscience on to the extraction of the teeth; she thus followed a method well known to us, for when we dare not acknowledge some great sin we deplore some small sin with the greater emphasis.
The problem seemed insoluble to the weak and sensitive mind of the patient, hence the affect became insurmountably
