Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/63

Rh and irony. He pleads for the justification of suicide with false philosophical premises and conclusions, and, as one would speak of the most indifferent affair, he declares that he intends to accomplish it. He regrets that his penknife has been taken from him. If he had it he would open his veins as Seneca did,—in the bath. A short time before a friend had given him, instead of a poison as he supposed, a cathartic. Instead of having been a means to send him to the other world, it had sent him to the water-closet. Only the Great Operator could eradicate his foolish and fatal idea by removing his senses, etc.

The patient has a large, rhombic, distorted skull, the left half of the forehead being flatter than the right. The occiput is very straight. Ears far back, widely projecting, and the external meatus forms a narrow slit. Genitals very lax; testicles unusually soft and small.

Now and then the patient suffers with onomatomania. He is compelled to think of the most useless problems and give up to an interminable distressing and worrying thought; and is so fatigued after it that he is no longer capable of any rational thought. After some months the patient was sent home unimproved. There he spent his time in reading and frivolities, and busied himself with the thought of founding a new Christianity, because Christ had been subject to grand delusions and had deceived the world with wonders (!). After remaining at home some years the sudden occurrence of a maniacal outbreak brought him again to the asylum. He presented a mixture of primordial delirium of persecution (devil, anti-christ, persecution, poisoning, persecutory voices) and delusions of grandeur (Christ, redemption of the world), with impulsive, incoherent actions. After five months there was a remission of this intercurrent acute mental disease, and the patient returned to the level of his original intellectual peculiarity and moral defect.

Case 9. E., aged 30, journeyman-painter, was arrested while trying to cut off the scrotum of a boy he had caught in the woods. He gave as a motive for this act that he wished to cut into it in order that the world should not multiply. Often in his youth, with like purpose, he had cut into his own genitals.

It is impossible to learn anything of his ancestry. From his childhood he was mentally abnormal, violent, never lively, very irritable, irascible, selfish, and weak-minded. He hated women, loved solitude, and read much. He sometimes laughed to himself and did silly things. Of late years his hatred of women had increased, especially of those that were pregnant, they being responsible for the misery of the world. He also hated children, and cursed his father. He entertained communistic ideas, and berated the rich and the ministry, and God, who had allowed him to come into the world so poor. He declared that it would be better to castrate all children than to allow others to come into the world that could only be fated to endure poverty and misery. He had always had the intention, from his fifteenth year, to castrate himself, in order to have