A neurasthenic volunteer.
Case 175. (E. Smith, June, 1916.)
A man who volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war (he had recently been an inmate of a sanatorium) was sent back to England as neurasthenic after three trying months at the front. The case sheet read that he was subject to dazed conditions. In hospital he suffered from insomnia, and before his slight periods of sleep he constantly had visions of two comrades who had been terribly lacerated at his side. These hallucinations in their reality aroused in him a fear that he was insane.
There were also terrifying dreams, beginning with episodes at the front and ending with sex experiences. These dreams were ended by seminal emissions. These formed a second cause for the patient’s belief that he was insane, as he said he remembered literature read as a boy concerning spermatorrhoea.
In the treatment of this case the writings of psychologists who had studied hypnagogic experiences were used and the absence of hallucinations during waking hours was stressed. The remembered literature regarding spermatorrhoea was discounted by the rational explanation of his state.
He seemed to be getting on well when a trivial accident caused a relapse. While he was saying goodby to his wife, who had visited him, she was taken ill, and he went home with her. He was punished for being late in returning to the hospital. Although no moral stigma attaches to confinements in barracks in most soldiers’ minds, in this man a depression was produced and suicidal talk followed. It seems that his father had been sent to jail when he was a child, and he felt he had been tainted by his father in such wise that his “criming” was due to heredity. With the removal of this misconception he became more rational and immensely improved.