The Permanent Relief of an Obsessional Phobia by Means of Communications with an Unsuspected Dual Personality

For over a year a twenty-year-old college girl, quiet, reserved, and well poised had suffered secretly from constantly recurring obsessive fears that the icebox, kitchen, college laboratory and locker doors had been left open. These fears were always accompanied by a compulsive, often uncontrollable need to examine and reëxamine the doors to make certain they were properly closed. She awoke in the night to make repeated trips to the kitchen in order to reassure herself but this failed to resolve her incessant doubts about the doors. An additional but seemingly unrelated symptom was an intense hatred of cats which she considered 'horrid, repulsive things'. This feeling she attributed to an early experience of watching 'an awful cat eating some nice pretty little baby robins'. It was learned that she enjoyed making pets of laboratory animals such as white rats and guinea pigs despite obsessive fears that she might fail to close the door of the animal room. At the time the patient was seen her difficulty was becoming more inclusive and she was beginning to have fleeting recurring doubts about many other doors, although not to a trouble-some degree.

Without any conscious or deliberate therapeutic intent on the part either of the student or of the investigator, this twenty-year-old