CASE HISTORIES 89 



was shown by his ill success with girls and hatred of them and by 

 his resistance towards his mother and sisters. No doubt he pro- 

 jected hostile physical and sexual wishes onto the environment, for 

 as he recovered he admitted that people didn't bother him so 

 much and finally didn't bother him at all. The change was en- 

 tirely within him, his environment was not altered. Anal erotic 

 and sadistic cravings were clearly revealed by his pleasant wet 

 dreams of accidents, broken legs and blood, in which he was an 

 interested spectator. 



SABIN 



History: He was a man thirty-six years old, slow and quiet 

 and well-behaved. He had lived an uneventful life on a southern 

 farm, sometimes clerking in stores in the winter, until he was 

 twenty-one. Then he enlisted in the army to see the world and 

 spent his five-year enlistment in two barracks. He didn't leave 

 one of them for six months and his comrades asked him why 

 he didn't bring his coffin in. During the service he married, his 

 wife remaining in her parents' home. They had one child, a son. 

 Apparently he was already slow and retarded before his discharge 

 from the army. He worked as a visiting nurse in Baltimore, 

 catheterizing prostate cases, and then was employed as a chore- 

 man in Shepherd and Enoch Pratt Hospital. After a month 

 he was fired. He tried for one day to find another job and then, 

 recalling how kindly the patients were treated at Pratt Hospital, 

 decided the easiest thing to do was to enter an insane hospital for 

 protection. He lost heart easily, he said. Accordingly he pre- 

 sented himself at one of the Maryland state hospitals and re- 

 quested that he be received. He screwed up his lip and stared 

 into the distance in an attempt to look crazy. They told him 

 they saw nothing the matter with him but would take him if he 

 so desired. This account is the patient's own version. 



He was hazy whether he spent three or five years in that 

 hospital. While there he worked on the farm. One day an 

 attendant told him he saw no use in a man as young and as well 

 as he staying there, and he ran away. At first he worked on a 

 farm not many miles away, but fearing he might be discovered he 

 left and came to Washington and hired out as a garbage wagoner. 



7 



