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This is a report on the psychoanalysis of two patients with diabetes mellitus—a man and a woman—both of whom developed their illness under the strain of an emotional conflict of striking similarity. Both patients showed unusually strong needs to receive and to be taken care of. The first patient's essential demands were stimulated by a physical trauma at the end of his weaning period; the second patient's by a traumatic weaning process. Both retained an infantile dependent and demanding attitude, and felt frustrated because their demands for attention and love were out of proportion to the reality situation of an adult and were consequently never adequately satisfied. To this frustration they reacted with hostility. Diabetes developed in both whne their infantile wishes were frustrated and the sugar output decreased when they temporarily renounced their demanding attitudes. It seems probable that these frustrated food-demanding drives may turn to an autoplastic satisfaction in a metabolic process which mobilizes glucose out of the glycogen stores of the body. The observation of increased sugar output during the night (independent of the carbohydrate intake) under certain emotional conditions is consistent with these assumptions. This interpretation is in conformity with recent experimental findings, namely, that in certain cases of diabetes mellitus the rise of the sugar level is dependent not on failure of sugar utilization but on sugar mobilization.
Both patients were under analysis for two years and during this period they underwent careful clinical observation including four to six sugar tests daily. One