Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/25

 PSYCHO- ANALYTICAL OBSERVATIONS ON TIC 17

all his teeth. A small abscess then started and the incentive produced by the pain became the source of a fresh mischief. He acquired the habit of loosening his teeth with his fingers, the pen- holders or the stick; he had to have all the incisors taken out one by one, then the eye-teeth and at last the front molars. Then he had a set of teeth made which proved a fresh pretext for tic! With his lips and tongue he continuously shifted the plate about, pushed it back and forth, to the right and left, turned it round in his mouth at the risk of swallowing it."

His own account was: "At times I am seized with the desire to take the plate out... I look for the smallest pretext to be alone for a moment only, then I take the plate out and push it in again at once; my desire is satisfied."

"He had also a tormenting scratching-tic. On every opportunity he felt his face with his hand, or scratched with his fingers at his nose, the corner of his eye, his ear, his cheek, etc. At one moment he would stroke his hair hastily with his hand and at the next he would twist, pull and tear his moustache that at times looked as if it had been cut with scissors."

The following is a case of Dubois': "A girl of twenty years would thrust at her breast with her elbow, the forearm bent back against her upper-arm; she thrust from 15 to 20 times a minute and continued until her elbow had struck the whalebone of her stays sharply. This violent thrust was accompanied by a little cry. The patient seemed only to derive satisfaction from her tic when she had carried out this last thrust."

I will later refer to the connection of similar symptoms with Onanism. Here I will touch on the analogy of the third kind of tic, i. e. the motor discharge ("Turning against one's own person", Freud), with a method of reaction that occurs in certain lower animals, which possess the capacity for "Autotomia". If a part of their body is painfully stimulated they let the part concerned "fall" in the true sense of the word by severing it from the rest of their body by the help of certain specialised muscular actions; others (like certain worms) even fall into several small pieces (they "burst asunder", as it were, from fury). Even the biting off of a painful limb is said to occur. A similar tendency for freeing one- self from a part of the body which causes pain is demon- strated in the normal "scratch-reflex", where the desire to scratch away the stimulated part is clearly indicated, in the tendencies to