1. Personal Name Reactions.— Oberndorf has already published in The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. V, No. 1, p. 47, an interesting study to show how unpleasant emotional reactions to personal names may result from an unconscious feeling on the part of the individual bearing that name that it in some way revealed an inherent weakness in personality which the individual wished to conceal. It was also pointed out in the same study that such individuals, through the alteration of their names, secured an unconscious outlet for the desire to rectify these deficiencies which they had in some way come to identify with their names. He reviewed some of the ancient theories regarding the influence of names on character, showing how purely fictitious many of such hypotheses were.
In the present study he discusses several new motivations concerning names. One patient clung to her maiden name, Frank, as an unconscious reminder to overcome an ambivalent inner weakness to be deceitful; another changed Nellie to Nelye. Nellie was unconsciously associated with inferior sexuality. Hence she tried unconsciously to sidestep her original name. An artist, Thomas, originally changed his surname because it exposed him to ridicule. Behind this rationalization analysis revealed that he had unconscious associations with masturbation behind the word Thomas. This he sought to avoid.
2. Reversal of Libido-sign.— As is well known, the love object, in persecutory projections, becomes the persecutor. More or less disguised, it is usually not difficult to trace the true situation. The return of the repressed libido in an ambivalent form constitutes the content of the
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delusion. What brings this ambivalent libido into action the author tries to discuss. He finds that the content of the delusion is frequently anal persecution, to the description of which it is often difficult to get the patient to admit. One mixed manic type was saying “they turned her the wrong way round.” Pressing led to “they have taken me through the little door; people go through the big door, though. People stay with their own husbands and at the big door. People don't go through the little door with neck-twisters. (What do you mean by the little door?)” “The back door.” Here the patient hit herself on the buttocks, “No real husband does this with his wife. People don't let themselves be turned the wrong way.” Another patient collected corks. He had several periods of manic excitement, one depression, and had systematized persecutory resting periods. [See Specht's discussion in descriptive psychiatry relative to this clinical phase. Abst] The purpose of the corks was to protect him “against it.” “He could shut up the opening.”
These anal acts, conceived of with lust and violence, seem to be the core of the delusional projection. Relief may come after speaking freely, but transference is quite problematical. The unconscious identification of the loved object with the feces is a specific factor in the paranoid ambivalent situation. The “feces” is the original persecutor. It commits anal acts of violence; also pleasurable. Overdetermination follows through the nursery clientele and dirtiness with displeasure and cleanliness with pleasure resymbolize into hatred and love automatically. Later memory effects tend to fecal identification: (1) Child's own body; (2) those in charge of it. The narcissistic components of the anal eroticism then will be modified on the basis of blame or praise. Negative narcissism finds its application pathologically in delusions of inferiority. Freud has assumed that delusions of grandeur come from sublimated homosexuality through regression to narcissism. The author would integrate the anal erotic component in this; so that his formula would read: Part of the sublimated homosexuality regresses to anal-erotism. In so far as the latter is positive it is used for reconstruction in the shape of delusions of grandeur, and in so far as it is negative it is diverted by being projected as a delusion of persecution.
3. Feeling of Persecution.— The author finds many analogues of delusions of persecution in his work. He takes up the origin of the feeling of being persecuted. In mitigated forms it is present in all of his psychoneurotic patients. Thus in neurotic ideas of reference: fear of being attacked from behind; not bear people walking behind him; dreams of persecution. The author believes these all traceable back to the anal erotic complex. He relates some instances: One patient attached great importance to what people said about him. They might sling mud at him. A dream contained an experience of something thrown at him (dung?) and a homosexual attack. He was a hypochondriacal
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type. Another patient claimed people were nothing to him. He could get along well without anybody. He was left much alone, but his sense of importance carried him over. He had a dream of shooting some dogs who became too friendly in their attentions.
The analysis came down upon the scybalae which were the original oppressors (see previous abstract). The anal erotic component was evident. Being assaulted (persecuted) may be a projection of the anal erotic sensations. The persecutor gets to be the personification of the scybalum. The author thinks psychiatrists can show whether these ideas are so. He evidently has not kept up with the American psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature, notably: White, Mental Mechanisms; Jelliffe, Technique of Psychoanalysis; Kempf, Autonomic System and Personality; also Kempf's excellent psychiatric material, Jl. Nerv. and Mental Disease, Jl. Abnormal Psychology, and his recent Psychopathology.
4. War Neurosis and Sex Inversion.— A partial analysis of a war neurosis in a young artistic individual of twenty-six brought out the fact that the most important feature in the genesis of the condition was a markedly repressed latent homosexual component. This was related to a very severe sexual trauma when he was fifteen or sixteen, a woman guest at his mother's home having forcibly committed “cunnilingus” (?) with him. This caused him to hate women and look for ideal friendships with men. The war neurosis symptoms cleared up, but the inversion was not analyzed.
[In the reviewer's experience with sexual inversion in the male practically every one has been seduced by older women, usually by fellatio. Thus far no such instance has been encountered with the female invert.]
5. Symbolisms of Fire and Water.— Flournoy gives a brief summary of an analysis of a married woman of forty-five who suffered from a complete urinary retention for a week following a loss of her purse, for which her husband reproached her. She required catheterization; the condition persisting, came for psychotherapeutic treatment. She dreamed the river Rhone was dry. Freud has shown the relation to children and fertility in water dreams. She had taken great precautions against impregnation by her second husband. In her dream she goes on to say that her husband could not catch any fish. Her desire to get away from him. After the third sitting the retention ceased, but the author does not give the analysis. He then gives a resume of eight dreams of an impotent medical student, afraid to go near women. The analyses are only inferential and not the result of associational processes, but are given for what they are worth.
6. Language and English Character.— In this short note Jones deals with English propriety, with its decadent prudishness and other manifestations of what McDougall might name the deficiency in the self
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regarding instinct. Psychoanalytically it may be a reaction-formation, probably of repressed exhibitionism. That it may also have a root in certain linguistic developments is the theme of the present short note. In so far as English is a mixture of a more primitive emotional component and a possible series of less vigorous synonyms, English fastidiousness has grown more marked by capacity for usual Latin refinements or original bold terms. Guts is obscene, intestines is refined, etc. Thus the old adventurer William some thousand years ago is to be blamed for part of this character trait of the English.
7. The Wish to Be a Man.— Sachs contributes a short note on an analysis of a woman who consulted him for her mild symptoms of uncertainty and inability to carry out her plans as well as she would like. She was not very sick. Analysis then uncovered a neurotic symptom belonging to her puberty period (fourteen), which consisted in an obsessional idea that people could see her genitals as she walked about. This had been successfully repressed. Free associations then led to an earlier twelve-year-old experience of rough boy and girl games with her cousins with much sexual contact. The fear she had lost her virginity at this time caused reproaches and great depression. Later she developed a horror for all close contacts with anyone. After three months of analysis she could tell her dreams, but her associations were very meager, but she did recall some phantasies of relations with Christ when she was about fifteen, similar to those she had with her boy cousin.
Masturbation soon followed and was remembered. This she had commenced after separation from the sex games with the cousins; menstruation at fourteen was interpreted as a punishment for this. Still, why this terror, since she had confessed the whole cousin thing to the mother. Then followed a vague and then clearer presentation of a twenty-four-five year old situation with a remembered sex act word indigenous to her country of birth which she had left at ten. Its meaning was not known. Also some guilty sense of a sex action and the idea that she had been deprived of her organ; it did not grow like her cousin's because of this earlier sin, and possibly from an earlier onanistic conflict, since she had a specially cruel attitude towards a well-disposed and kind nurse maid. Then, in wondering about biting one's hand, the association came of the belief that her penis had been bitten off. The mythological associations Sachs brings out. The earliest remembrance of her childhood still is a cover memory. Biting her hand was the active for the passive being bitten. It served to get relief for repressed tendencies; she hurt her own hand as satisfaction and punishment. Her envy regarding men and her inferiority feeling with desire to be a man stand revealed in the light of her infantile phantasies.
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8. Drawing Conclusions.—This partial analysis of a woman touches on a small point of where too recondite an inference for a symptomatic act was unjustified.
9. Revived Sensory Memory.— Also a short note on the analysts of a phobia of killing people in a woman of thirty-five, and in which the title of a book in the doctor's room provided a stimulus for the uncovering of a memory of four or five year old experience like a birth phantasy. The title of the book was “Look—We Have Come Through.” It had cubist designs on the cover which reminded her vaguely of some rhythmic movements which had some sexual connotation for her.
10. Substitutive Memory.— A patient trying to remember “sepia” associates it with “bastard” and “Lebanon.” The latter only is followed out. Sepia was a brown sticky stuff in his sister's paint box. Lebanon followed through cedars; cedar oil; oil immersion; microscope; semen; fear of impregnating a girl; recurrent masturbation led to brown fluid emissions, etc. Jones finally equates sepia as leading to Lebanon by way of sepia—semen—cedar.
11. A series of Collective Reviews now follow. These are translations of a series published in Vol. Ill, Beihefte d. Internat. Zeitsch. f. a. Psychoanalyse. They are all of great importance to the students of psychoanalysis. We can here list them: (1) Hitschmann, Theory of Instinct and Sexuality; (2) Abraham, K., Special Pathology and Therapy of the Neuroses and Psychoses; (3) Ophuijsen, Psychoanalytic Therapy; (4) Ferenczi; General Theory of the Neuroses; (5) Hug-Hellmuth, Child Psychology and Education.
12. The Report of the Sixth Psychoanalytic Congress at The Hague, September, 1920, is given, with short abstracts of the papers: Abraham, Female Castration Complex; Deutsch, Psychology of Suspicion; Stärcke, Castration Complex; Hattenberg, Transference and Instinct; Flügel, Biology and Sexual Repression; Sachs, Day Dreams; Reik, Sfrange God; Roheim, Australian Totemism; Simmel, Psychoanalysis of Gambler; Freud, Theory of Dreams; Ferenczi, Active Therapy; Sokolinska, Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses;- Groddeck, Psychoanalysis and Organic Disease; Binswanger, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry; Starcke, Neuroses and Psychoses; Pfister, Psychoanalysis and Law; Spielrein, Speech Origin; Stegman, Form and Content; Hug-Hellmuth, Children Analysis.
