the fairy tales by the patient in the sense in which they should be I understood in this work.
Social weakness, intellectual and other defectiveness, defeat in the sexual competition. Lack of sexual satisfaction is often bound up[1] with the disposition to psychoses, so that it must not surprise us, if the psychoses produce, in like frequency, wish structures, and that the patients, in these structures, are rich, fruitful, strong, of princely descent, marry princes and princesses, and that the rivals and adversaries are killed and avenged.
Indeed the clinical forms of these wish structures and the diseases belonging to them are very varied.
A poor maiden wanted to marry a shoemaker and did not get him. We are poorly informed of the exact processes at the beginning of the psychosis. But a peculiar motor stereotypy which lasted over thirty years could still be traced back to its origin. During the whole day, tireless as a pendulum, she stroked the back of the left hand with the back of the right fist, so that the skin over the joints of the fingers of the right hand was thickened and horny and the joints themselves, as was demonstrated at autopsy, had suffered a wearing away of the articular cartilages (so-called arthritis deformans). It turned out that the stereotypy had followed from, what in the first years was a quite clearly recognizable movement of shoe polishing, which points us to the relation with the unhappy love for the shoemaker.
Another form is that of the wish delirium.
A young woman with a very good literary and musical education, wished nothing better than to marry a young and excellent artist. Her wishes were without prospect of fulfillment; an acute illness set in. She was committed to the asylum and conceived of the commitment of herself and everything that happened about her as a descent into the underworld. The determiner of these thoughts was the artist's last work "Charon." The further happenings in her environment she interpreted by the occurrence of a whole mass of reminiscences brought together out of her life, as difficulties or objections, which opposed her union with her beloved, but finally everything was overcome. Finally she saw in a fellow patient her beloved and slept with her several nights.
- ↑ The question of the causality of these factors will here be left open; certainly there exists a tension between the attainable and the wished for.
