The Ego and Motility in Sleepwalking

Reconsideration of sleepwalking from the viewpoint of developmental and ego psychology may be of interest both clinically and theoretically. Sleepwalking, still a dramatic and rather puzzling symptom, is also a phenomenon related to the problem of consciousness. The author was fortunate in being able to study seven cases of somnambulism. One was an adult woman referred for somnambulism. She was analyzed and studied over a period of more than five years. Six additional cases in children treated in outpatient clinics also were studied.1

Early studies of sleepwalking had emphasized the relationship to hysteria and hypnotic phenomena. However, the role of the ego in dreams and sleep has been emphasized by French (4) and others. That ego development, self-assertion, and aggression are intimately connected with skilled motor activity such as locomotion and manipulation has been discussed by Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (8) and more recently by Mittelmann (15). In the five recent conferences on problems of consciousness sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr., Foundation, sleepwalking was touched on only incidentally by Rapaport (16) and Kleitman (12). Rapaport, in a discussion of a case of hysterical amnesia drew comparisons between sleepwalking, amnesia and fugue states. What they have in common is that unconscious wishes are acted out rather than expressed in symbolic form as in dreams. Earlier workers, Ferenczi (3), Coriat (2), and Sadger (17), had also done this. Kleitman, who as a physiologist has for many years concerned himself with the problem of sleep, pointed out that in somnambulism and in other states of altered consciousness many "side branchings" occur, as