CASE HISTORIES 5! 



i 



said he was overloaded with responsibility and that if anything 

 happened to him the world would go to destruction. While going 

 through the backyard to the privy he heard two voices disputing. 

 One said, " Grab him," but the other said, " You can't touch 

 him." He often heard these two voices disputing afterwards. 

 For a week he tried to keep on working, though pestered by 

 visions and voices, then had to quit. He reached St. Elizabeths 

 in August. 



Sex life: He began masturbating at eight, and at one time 

 did it daily, but realized it was bad for him and gradually 

 stopped it altogether. He believed he sometimes thought of 

 girls while doing it. He was bashful with girls and seldom went 

 with them, preferring the company of boys. He never had a 

 best girl, and was afraid of rivalry with other fellows over a 

 girl. Sexual intercourse was not much of a temptation. He 

 feared making a girl pregnant for he hadn't enough money to 

 marry. He was very much afraid of venereal disease. 



At Panama, when he was twenty-six, he had his only hetero- 

 sexual experiences, a half dozen in all, but got very little enjoy- 

 ment or feeling out of them. "Something ran through my 

 mind." He soon tired of it, and the fear of disease was ever 

 present. His night orgasms were infrequent and when there 

 was any dream at all in connection with them it was of normal 

 coitus. He had never committed perversions. 



Fantasies: The kernel of his trouble, he declared, was that 

 there was something in him that if taken out might do great 

 damage, and only the devil knew what that something was (per- 

 verse impulses?). 



He dramatized a struggle between two forces, good and evil 

 like the two disputing voices. He himself was good, backed by 

 visions of saints in white, crosses in the sky, and a full regalia of 

 crowns, balls, candlesticks, and moons such as decorated his home 

 church. A grandiose element entered in also, he was head of the. 

 Catholic, Jewish, and Turkish religions, higher than the pope, in 

 fact he was too good for this earth and was expected to rise 

 to heaven. He had been the sun, Moses, and St. Patrick, and 

 had been crucified several times. When he was killed in ancient 

 times, the world came to an end. 



