mother of countless thousands, arises in its naïve nakedness from an exuberant phantasy which is, of course, very characteristic of the period of puberty. It is the woman’s premonition of the sexual feeling, the dream of fruitfulness, which the patient has turned into these monstrous ideas. We shall not go wrong if we seek for the curious form of the disease in the teeming sexuality of this too-rich soil. Viewed from this standpoint, the whole creation of Ivenes with her enormous family is nothing but a dream of sexual wish-fulfilment, differentiated from the dream of a night only in that it persists for months and years.
Relation to the Hysterical Attack.
So far one point in S.W.’s history has remained unexplained, and that is her attack. In the second séance she was suddenly seized with a sort of fainting fit, from which she awoke with a recollection of various hallucinations. According to her own statement, she had not lost consciousness for a moment. Judging from the external symptoms and the course of the attack, one is inclined to regard it as a narcolepsy, or rather a lethargy; such, for example, as Loewenfeld has described, and the more readily as we know that previously one member of her family (her grandmother) had an attack of lethargy. It is possible to imagine that the lethargic disposition (Loewenfeld) had descended to our patient. In spiritualistic séances it is not usual to see hysterical convulsions. Our patient showed no sort of convulsive symptoms, but in their place, perhaps, the peculiar sleeping states. Ætiologically at the outset two moments must be taken into consideration:
- 1. The irruption of hypnosis.
- 2. The psychic stimulation.
1. Irruption of Partial Hypnosis.—Janet observes that the
