The Metamorphosis of Mary: An Unclassified Neurosis

During ten years of judicial experience I have tried about five thousand divorce cases. In a great many of these cases the parties and witnesses appeared personally before me. In the others I read the testimony as reported by masters and examiners. Being deeply interested in psychology, each one of these divorce cases, aside from its legal aspects, presented a psychological study of greater or less complexity. But I soon discovered that a certain kind of case came with great frequency; and all cases of that kind were so nearly alike that I foreknew the high lights of each one as soon as the preliminaries were presented.

My interest being thus aroused, I applied the cardinal principles of psychoanalysis to many cases of that kind, and in a few instances I effected more or less comprehensive analyses. In this way I seem to have brought to light a form of neurosis not hitherto classified. I will cite a typical case, and then endeavor to give the mechanism of its evolution.

John Smith was just an average young man twenty-three years of age. He was the son of a retail grocer. When he had finished high school he went to work in his father's store. When he was twenty-one years of age he went on the road as traveling salesman for a wholesale grocery concern. When he was twenty-three years of age—that is, at the time this brief statement of his case begins—he married Mary Jones, a daughter of the shipping clerk of the firm by which he was employed as salesman. Mary was twenty-one years of age, and had left high school at the end of her junior year.

The parents of the newly married couple were unable to render them any very material financial assistance, and they were thrown largely upon their own resources. They rented a modest bungalow, and began keeping house. They were very happy, and very devoted to each other. A year after their marriage their first baby was born—