A Psycho-Analytical Explanation of Micropsia

Several years ago a boy about eight years of age was brought to me because he saw objects smaller than normal. Asked for an example, the mother said that a day or two before she had been holding up an apple and her son had suddenly called out 'I have such a funny sensation; that apple is growing smaller and smaller as I look at it'. The temptation—the word is apt in connection with the subject of apples—to use the association was irresistible, and I asked the mother in what way her child's behaviour at the breast had been unusual. The phenomenon he described gave me the impression of a rapidly receding object appearing as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She told me rather shamefacedly that she had not weaned him until he was two years old. Was he looking back through the intervening years and seeing the beloved breast in the same way as the theologians do when they trace man's troubles in the Old Testament to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden? The notes of the case have been temporarily misplaced, and the incident was not recalled until recently, when once more I was asked to deal with a similar problem. The patient was a boy of ten, who complained that objects became smaller as he gazed at them. The mother gave as an instance the cups and saucers on the table, whilst the boy said it often happened after he had read the page of a book, and sometimes when he looked at his mother. The association of mother with food receptacles and literature (food for the mind) seemed not unlike the apple theme of the previous case, so I now went further than merely suggesting an abnormal breast-feeding period; I said that it must have been excessively long. The mother agreed; the child had not been weaned until he was fifteen months old, because, as she said, 'he had been so cross about it'. Yet she had had no difficulty in weaning at the eighth month her other child, a boy five years older, when it became necessary for her to go into a nursing home