Magic and The Psychology of Compulsive States

The patient whose problems occasioned the following study was an unmarried woman in her early twenties. She first sought medical help because of an apparently somatic illness. Whenever she tried to eat she would be seized by choking spasms which made swallowing difficult or even impossible; when she did swallow she would often vomit. During the last few months before her first interview she had lost about twenty-five pounds in weight. She was haunted by attacks of unexplainable anxiety and depression. Compulsive notions would obtrude themselves upon her—that she had committed some horrible deed, that some dreadful misfortune was imminent or that she might have to kill herself. She fully realized the irrational and compulsive character of these notions, without, of course, being able to free herself from them.

The personal history threw comparatively little light on her impasse. An only child, of Scottish extraction, she had lived with both her parents until, when she was seventeen, her father died. Since then she had worked and continued to live with her mother. Both parents were simple people with a conventional, traditional outlook on life and little formal education. The patient's work was a quasi-artistic one, painting shop-window models. There was a great feeling of closeness with her mother, since the two women represented and, as it were, maintained the continuity of the family. Nevertheless, it soon became evident that the patient also resented her mother as too domineering, although in a very gentle fashion, and as representing to her the uncompromising demands of custom and traditional morality.

For the last two years she had been engaged. At first all went well. She felt that a “modern” girl might and should have premarital sexual relations. She had had an affair before in which, apart from purely physical attraction, she was not too deeply involved emotionally. This time, however, as the