After this she believed herself pregnant, felt and heard twins in her womb, later believed herself later to have been delivered of them and hallucinated a child by her in her bed. With this the wish delirium, of nearly three months standing came to a close. She had found—unfortunately not definitely—a curative surrogate for reality.
Among the so-called prison psychoses, mental diseases which are produced through confinement, and either belong to the known clinical disease groups or perhaps occur as independent diseases, are found certain cases of outspoken wish type. The voices announce freedom, beloved relations rescue the prisoner or similar things. Moritz von Schwind has represented in an exceedingly convincing manner in his "Dream of the Prisoner" the wish dream of one in confinement (original in the Schack gallery in Munich).
The wish structure can, as already said, take on any number of clinical forms, ecstasy, cataleptic states, transitory sensory falsifications, hysteriform attacks, mimic automatisms, the progressive development extending over years of a wish-fulfilling delusional system with otherwise correct behavior, and so forth.
Naturally it is not meant to say that all that we see in the mental diseases are only wish structures, however these stand to the remaining appearances of the pathological complex in a quite special relation which we will not follow further here.
I hope through narration and observed examples taken from literature, more than through such a clinical and theoretical exposition, to have shown the significance of wish structures in our psychology and so to have prepared the understanding for similar structures in the fairy tales.
