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Phyllis Greenacre has described clinical observations of pathological weeping.1 She points out that she limits herself to those cases in which the weeping is related to 'underlying disturbances of urination'. She found that pathological weeping in women is of two types, both representing a displacement upon weeping of the urge to urinate. In one type, the woman weeps 'in anger and in partial resignation because she cannot approximate male urination'. The other type is 'a substitute for male urination'.
A different cause and mechanism of pathological weeping came under my observation during the psychoanalytic treatment of a woman whom I shall call Laura, a severe 'borderline' case whose main symptoms besides the pathological weeping were constant depression, severe compulsive ideas of killing her family and herself, and frequent murderous threats and phenomena of depersonalization.2
During Laura's treatment there developed a neurodermatitis of unheard-of severity, described by the patient as driving her mad. No dermatologist could find its cause or in any way relieve it. Analysis showed that her skin was of fundamental importance in her bond with her mother. Laura could not live, as it were, unless she put herself into the skin of her mother or mother images, or fused her skin with theirs. All the patient's relationships with the people who surrounded her,—the most important of them being the analyst, a mother image,—were nothing more than skin relationships. In her own words,