Discussion of Norman Tabachnick and Robert E. Litman's Article, Character and Life Circumstance in Fatal Accident

I should like to suggest that the authors' description of the accident victim reminds one of the hypomanic character. The defense in the hypomanic is denial and what is denied is most importantly a fear of death: a fear of being killed by a jealous parent.

In this regard a story of Kafka's comes to mind. A young industrialist has just had two happy experiences. He has doubled the business of his old and paralyzed father's firm and has become engaged to a beautiful young aristocrat, a woman of a class to which his father could never have aspired. He goes in joyfully to break the news to his father, also saying that he and his bride-to-be would be most happy to have his father live with them. Instead of pleasure, the father hurls the most awful curses at the young man, who then flees from his father's house and drowns himself. We see here the hypomanic mood with the total denial of his fathers probable jealousy, followed by a swift, unexpected, jealous and brutal attack by the father, followed by suicide.

In most patients I have seen, the “attack” comes from the superego, following the hypomanic mood, and is seen as an expression of jealousy in the outside world.

The problem of character, identity and identity crisis follows from this. For instance, in business, if one has the reality of being a good subordinate and hence being loved by the chief, a promotion which this type of character reacts to with joy, nevertheless, puts him into a position of competing with the chief in reality or fantasy. His identity therefore becomes that of a competitor instead of a subordinate. In the hypomanic character the conflict is not conscious nor is it worked through by the ego, but instead it may be worked through regressively in taking unwarranted risks, as though both to do something dangerous and to deny the danger.

The differential diagnosis between patients who react to the hypomanic mood with subsequent depression, schizophrenia or perverse activity, and those who seek out dang