The Psychoanalytic Review. LXXII, 1985: A Case That Throws Light on the Mechanism of Regression in Schizophrenia. Helene Deutsch, with a Brief Introduction by Paul Roazen. Pp. 1-8.

This 1919 paper is one of the early psychoanalytic papers that attempted to understand the symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia. It does not offer a comprehensive view but focuses on some symptoms in a particular patient, a thirty-four-year-old woman blind from the second or third year of life, whose psychotic illness was reported to have begun three years before her admission to the hospital. Deutsch examined her; their contact could be characterized as exploration of her symptoms rather than psychoanalytic treatment. After a period of withdrawal, the patient became delusional, excitable, and after a time incontinent of urine and feces. Following Tausk's lead, Deutsch ascribed her symptoms (such as the delusion that if she ate others could not, or that the influence of outside omnipotent forces caused her incontinence) to the loss of ego boundaries and the projection of one aspect of ambivalent impulses. Deutsch notes that the patient's delusion represents her wish to be turned into a small child, but she does not develop this idea. She elaborates on a series of dreams in which the patient reported that she could see. Deutsch interprets this as a "loss of the consciousness of being blind." It is unclear whether Deutsch is looking for motives of this wish, such as denial, a wish to see, or to regress, or whether she considers this as possible "regression in a physical sense" to memories prior to the patient's loss of sight.