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'Reluctantly Told' is an account of the author's recollections of an attack of manic-depressive insanity written after leaving the asylum in which she had lived for four years. Without knowledge of the latest theories of the psychosis, she gives an accurate description of her feelings
in the different stages of her disorder, and this description corresponds to a remarkable degree with Abraham's concept of the mechanism of this insanity in his 'Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis.'
Jane Hillyer was the youngest daughter of two musicians. The father was a highly sensitive idealist, dominated by the desire to create a demand for music in an industrial community of a north-western State; he was frustrated in his efforts by the overwhelming inertia of the external world and his own high-keyed temperament. He seems to have had some degree of oral fixation, which is manifested by his resorting to alcohol as a refuge and by his final suicide by poison when Jane was thirteen years old. Her mother was a music teacher, resolute and courageous, who strove to fight on beside her husband—'the test of her own personality lay with his success or failure'—and after his death made her children's successful living her chief concern; they were brought up in an atmosphere of effort to continue their father's work in their own lives. She appears to have been a well-balanced person, even-tempered, with a sense of humour, quietly calm.
Jane had an older brother and sister, about whom little is told. Much of Jane's attitude as a child can be gathered from her account of her feelings in the manic stage. From subsequent events we can see Jane as a baby with a strong constitutional oral fixation to her mother, with difficulty passing through the anal stage and early forming a severe super-ego before the genital stage of object love was reached. We see in her subsequent history evidence of a strong fixation to her father, which is shown in her description of herself dancing to his airs,