Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/137

Rh professorship—is doubloon—twenty-five francs—that is the highest—prison—slandered by bad people—unreason—cruelty—excess—rudeness.

The thoughts did not follow smoothly, but were constantly inhibited by "thought-deprivation" which patient designated as an invisible force which always takes away just what she wishes to say. Thought-deprivation especially appears whenever she wishes to explain something conclusive. The conclusive is the complex. Thus we see in the above analysis that the essential appears only after having been preceded by a number of obscure analogies. The object of the test is, as the patient knows, to explain the neologisms. If it takes her so long to reproduce the important phrase ("no thread cut") her imaginative faculty must suffer from a peculiar disturbance which can be best designated as deficiency in the faculty of discrimination between the important and the unimportant material. The explanation of her stereotype "I am Socrates" or "I am Socratic" lies in the fact that she was the "best tailoress" "who never cut a thread" and "never had a piece of cloth on the floor." She is an "artist," a "professor" in her line. She is tortured, she is not recognized as world proprietress, etc., she is considered sick which is a "slander." She is "wise" and "modest." She has performed the "highest." All these are analogies to the life and end of Socrates. She therefore wishes to say "I am and suffer like Socrates." With a certain poetic license, characteristic in a moment of strong affect, she says directly "I am Socrates." The pathological part in this is the fact that the degree of her identification with Socrates is such that she cannot free herself from it. She takes her identification in a way as self-evident and presupposes so much reality for the metonymy that she expects everybody to understand it. Here we distinctly see the inability of discriminating between two ideas. Every normal person can differentiate between an assumed part or a metaphoric designation and his real personality, even if a vivid phantasy, i. e., an intense feeling-tone will for a time firmly adhere to such a dream or wish-formation. The correction finally comes with a reversal of feeling and with a readaptation to reality. The process is somewhat different in the unconscious. We saw, for example,