Postencephalitic respiratory disorders : review of syndromy, case reports, physiopathology, psychopathology and therapy / by Smith Ely Jelliffe.

  • Jelliffe, Smith Ely, 1866-1945.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Postencephalitic respiratory disorders : review of syndromy, case reports, physiopathology, psychopathology and therapy / by Smith Ely Jelliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    137/152 (page 125)
    which forces the energy to run counter to reality and serves to push back instinctive processes to earlier stages of their expressions and will not permit new efforts to regain what has been lost? In crude terms, what has played hell with the morale f As already intimated the lack of impulse is only apparent. There is, as in the schizophrenic, plenty of impulse but it is inhibited, repressed. What is the mech¬ anism of this inhibition, psychologically speaking? Pathophysio- logically considered we have seen the trauma that interferes with the functioning of innumerable pathways which might discharge tension at higher levels, hence increased pressure on instinctual outlets at lower levels. Here is where the Super-Ego is active. On the side of the incest prohibition, the Super-Ego seems to prohibit all genital sexuality. It raises up such a “ sense of guilt ” that the patient is pushed back to an autoplastic form of gratification which tragically enough gives it, by this camouflage, the very thing— i.e., incest wish gratification, which it denies. The symptom, “ breath¬ ing,” “ salivation,” represents a discharge of tension at the Id level. This the Super-Ego permits. But the Ego refuses to acknowledge its real nature, and in therapy, raises up resistances against revealing it. Just as in life the patient resists everything, approaching the negativism of the schizophrenic, and differing from it only volumetrically. Some evidence has been given concerning the regressive auto¬ plastic respiratory-erotic gratification of the unconscious incestuous wish in Case I. Case II showed similar mechanisms in her dream life. This is accented only because, in a general sense, orientation towards the CEdipus situation affords a starting point in the thera¬ peutic attack. No such crude ideas as taxing the patient with it is ever thought of—this much for the critics, totally uncomprehending the entire modus operandi of the unconscious. The very first dream brought by Case II; long before a word had been said about psychoanalysis, or what was the matter with her, but in the period when one was concerned solely with the gross phe¬ nomena, the history taking, etc., was as follows : My brother (the sick one, with a schizoid postencephalitic ill¬ ness) and I zvere in a room of our Philadelphia house. We were seated in different parts of the room smoking cigarettes. I turned my back for a moment and then noticed at the base of the mantelpiece, where the fire is, a garden hose. My brother took hold of this and