Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/18

 10 S. FERENCZI

praise or blame. I watch for any words of praise and suffer cruelly from indifference or derision. . . hardest to bear is the thought that I behave in a ridiculous manner and that everyone laughs at me."¹ "When I meet people on the street or in an omnibus I fancy they regard me with a peculiar look of scorn or pity which makes me feel either ashamed or angry." Or "Two persons live in me : one with tic and one without The first is the son of the second, a worthless child who gives his father much trouble. The father should punish his son but he is generally unable to do so; he therefore remains a slave to the whims of his own creation."

Such confessions show tic patients as of a mentally infantile character, narcissistically fixated, from which the healthily developed part of the personality can with difficulty free itself. The predo- minance of the pleasure-principle (corresponding to narcissism) can be seen from the following pronouncements : "I only do well what pleases me, that which bores me I either do badly or not at all." "If he has an idea, he must give himself up to it absolutely. He listens to others unwillingly." Further remarks of Meige and Feindel on the infantilism of tic patients run as follows : "The mental condition of tic patients is at a lower age level than it should actually be". "Every tic patient has the mind of a child" (p. 88). "Tic is mental infantilism." "Tic patients are big, badly brought-up children accustomed to give way to their moods never having learned to discipline their wills" (p. 89). "A nineteen year old Tiqueur had to be put to bed by *Mama* and cared for like a baby."² He also showed physical signs of infantilism. The incapacity to keep back a thought is purely a psychic pendant to the incapacity to endure a sense stimulus without an immediate defence reaction. Speech is the motor reaction to abreact the preconscious (in thought) psychic tension. In this sense we are in agreement with Charcot's view of the existence of a purely psychic tic. The proofs continue to increase that go to show that it is the narcissistic over-sensitiveness in Tiqueurs that results in the in-

¹ Idem., Op. cit., p. 20.

² Idiots (who have not emerged from infancy nor therefore from nar- cissism) very often suffer from tics and stereotypes. Nolr compares the balanc- ing and rotating of the head in idiots with "a kind of rocking that quiets the patient and helps him to sleep, and which he much likes". . . "it has a similar action to the actual rocking of a little child". Jdem, Op. cit., p. 273.