CASE HISTORIES 75 



Fantasies: He had the usual delusions and hallucinations. 

 "Other minds were influencing me. Some superior power was 

 working on me and pushing me to do things against my will. The 

 Catholics used influence on me to my hurt, they used witchcraft. 

 That influence was beyond my control. When I was first brought 

 to the hospital I ate my feces and drank my urine to prove I was 

 brave and that I would not practice Catholicism. I'm a Jew." 

 (Here he showed the common symbolization of the conflict of 

 impulses as Catholics versus their religious opponents. Which 

 party is the wicked one depends on the patient's own religious 

 convictions. This man was further influenced by his unfortunate 

 experience with his mother's confessor. Loyal Catholics like 

 Lefferts make the Masons the devilish tempters who use influence 

 on them to make them commit sexual perversions.) In addition 

 people had tried to poison him, and he had felt electricity surge 

 through him from his feet upwards, and his hair was pulled up. 

 Another patient had put cocaine up his nose during his sleep and 

 influenced him, and that had driven him insane. 



He had been used as a tool for other people's purposes, they 

 had hypnotized him and driven him insane and had him brought 

 here to get evidence on him, for they wanted a scapegoat. He 

 saw secret service agents in disguise all around him and suspected 

 me of being one also, though at times he believed I was as I said 

 a psychologist trying to help him. Once he told me he didn't want 

 to talk with me, for he feared I would destroy his belief in his 

 delusions and he preferred to keep them. 



" The kernel of my trouble is that my strength and sex power 

 have been sapped and it is something outside me that has done it." 

 He was very busy trying to reason out just what had sucked his 

 strength. One theory was that when struck by the train in his 

 boyhood he "lost some of what a male is entitled to. I'm not 

 the man my father was." But the sniffing seemed the likeliest 

 method. The ward physician had a habit of sniffing and, being 

 ignorant of the delusion, was much startled when one day the 

 patient without warning spat copiously in his face. The doctor 

 thought he had filled his mouth with water at the tap, but he 

 reassured him later that it was only saliva. He realized now that 



