In my work of mental and nervous diseases I become more and more
convinced of the preponderant influence of early childhood in the
causation of psychopathic mental maladies. _Most, in fact all, of those
functional mental diseases originate in early childhood._ A couple of
concrete cases will perhaps best illustrate my point:
The patient is a young man of 26. He suffers from intense melancholic
depression, often amounting to agony. He is possessed by the fear of
having committed the unpardonable sin. He thinks that he is damned to
suffer tortures in hell for all eternity. I cannot go here into the
details of the case, but an examination of the patient by the hypnoidal
state clearly traced his present condition to the influence of an old
woman, a Sunday school teacher, who infected him with those virulent
germs in his very early childhood, about the age of five. Let me read to
you a paragraph from the patient’s own account: “It is difficult to
place the beginning of my abnormal fear. It certainly originated from
doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a
rather ignorant elderly woman, who taught Sunday school. My early
religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of
torture that might be awaiting me, if I was not good enough to be
saved.”
Another patient of mine, a clergyman’s wife, was extremely nervous,
depressed, and suffered from insomnia, from nightmares, from panophobia,
general fear, dread of the unknown, from claustrophobia, fear of
remaining alone, fear of darkness and numerous other fears and insistent
ideas, into the details of which I cannot go here. By means of the
hypnoidal state the symptoms were traced to impressions of early
childhood; when at the age of five, the patient was suddenly confronted
by a maniacal woman. The child was greatly frightened, and since that
time she became possessed by the fear of insanity. When the patient gave
birth to her child, she was afraid the child would become insane; many a
time she even had a feeling that the child _was_ insane. Thus the fear
of insanity is traced to an experience of early childhood, an experience
which, having become subconscious, is manifesting itself persistently in
the patient’s consciousness.
The patient’s parents were very religious, and the child was brought up
not only in the fear of God, but also in the fear of hell and the devil.
Being sensitive and imaginative, the devils of the gospel were to her
stern realities. She had a firm belief in “diabolical possessions” and
“unclean spirits”; the legend of Jesus exorcising in the country of the
Gadarenes unclean spirits, whose name is Legion, was to her a tangible
reality. She was brought up on brimstone and pitch, with everlasting
fires of the “bottomless pit” for sinners and unbelievers. In the
hypnoidal state she clearly remembered the preacher, who used every
Sunday to give her the horrors by his picturesque descriptions of the
tortures of the “bottomless pit.” She was in anguish over the unsolved
question: “Do little sinner-girls go to hell?” This fear of hell made
the little girl feel depressed and miserable and poisoned many a
cheerful moment of her life.
What a lasting effect and what a melancholy gloom this fear of ghosts
and of unclean spirits of the bottomless pit produced on this young life
may be judged from the following facts: When the patient was about
eleven years old, a young girl, a friend of hers, having noticed the
patient’s fear of ghosts, played on her one of those silly, practical
jokes, the effect of which on sensitive natures is often disastrous and
lasting. The girl disguised herself as a ghost, in a white sheet, and
appeared to the patient, who was just on the point of falling asleep.
The child shrieked in terror and fainted. Since that time the patient
suffered from nightmares and was mortally afraid to sleep alone; she
passed many a night in a state of excitement, frenzied with the fear of
apparitions and ghosts.
When about the age of seventeen, she apparently freed herself from the
belief in ghosts and unclean powers. But the fear acquired in her
childhood did not lapse; it persisted subconsciously and manifested
itself in the form of uncontrollable fears. She was afraid to remain
alone in a room, especially in the evening. Thus, once when she had to
go upstairs, alone to pack her trunks, a gauzy garment called forth the
experience of her ghost-fright; she had the illusion of seeing a ghost,
and fell fainting to the floor. Unless specially treated, fears acquired
in childhood last through life.
“Every ugly thing,” says Mosso, the great Italian physiologist, “told to
the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute
splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long.
“An old soldier whom I asked what his greatest fears had been, answered
me thus: ‘I have only had one, but it pursues me still. I am nearly
seventy years old, I have looked death in the face I do not know how
many times; I have never lost heart in any danger, but when I pass a
little old church in the shades of the forest, or a deserted chapel in
the mountains, I always remember a neglected oratory in my native
village, and I shiver and look around, as though seeking the corpse of a
murdered man which I once saw carried into it when a child, and with
which an old servant wanted to shut me up to make me good.’” Here, too,
experiences of early childhood have persisted subconsciously throughout
lifetime.