wish you would die my poor little mother...so that you may go to heaven." In the recovery, when the dying had had its turn, Thérèse looks at the "heavenly mother," that is, the mother is now in heaven, and "the little flower is reborn through a ray of her gentle sun" (the father).

The money given for the Masses which are to cause Thérèse to be reborn shows the father's love to her. The mother is a prostitute with whom the father has intercourse, because of the child carried in her womb.

It is unnecessary to say much about the aspect of the punishment of the sisters which is a part of the gratification of the illness, it is always mentioned in connection with her own sufferings and shows an identification. Pauline must suffer for marrying Christ, because the devil is jealous. A useful projection, but the angry devil is the angry God of her childhood, who terrifies her with his phallus. Here, however, is distinct penis envy. Her father is also made miserable.

In the original phantasy the castration of the father is expressed by the place of censorship. What could God do to her then? So the Virgin watches over her, and the devil cannot harm her.

The torpor of which she speaks in her illness, possibly represents the mother lying immovable in the coffin, and the death which takes her to heaven. Years later, when she was watching by the death-bed of the mother superior of the convent (not Pauline), she experienced a sort of torpor, and an awakening from it, at the moment of death, which she calls birth into heaven. She herself links up this death with her own mother's death1.

The day when this venerable mother left her exile for the fatherland (la patrie)-note the expression-I received a very special blessing. It was the first time that I was present at a death-bed; it was really a most entrancing sight. But for the two hours that I spent at the foot of the bed of the dying saint, I was seized with a sort of torpor; I was full of trouble about it, and then at the moment that our mother was born into heaven, I felt filled with an indescribable joy and fervour, as if the blessed soul of our sainted mother had at that moment given me a share of the joy in which she already rejoiced; as I am sure that she went straight to heaven.

There can be no doubt that this phantasy played a large part in her vocation; she writes2, "The good master transplanted her (Thérèse) to Mount Carmel, in the garden chosen by the Virgin Mary." Her favourite name for a nun is the "bride of Christ." "I have found my vocation,

it is love! and this place, O my God, it is Thou who hast given it to me, in the heart of the Church my Mother, I shall be love...so I shall be everything1."

Here we find that this child in the womb identification, if we may so call it, satisfies her extraordinary narcissism, of which the following is an amusing example. Her libidinal desires had been stimulated by hearing of the marriage of a cousin of whom she saw a good deal in her childhood. She said it aroused her to try more than ever to please her spouse, "the king of kings." She was at the time instructress of the novices, and in order to bring home to them the greatness of their marriage destiny, she wrote the following lettre de faire part2.

God the almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, Sovereign Lord of the world, and the most Glorious Virgin Mary, Queen of the Heavenly court, invite you to the spiritual marriage of their August Son, Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, with little Thérèse Martin,...you are invited to the wedding reception when Jesus... will come in the splendour of His Majesty to judge the quick and the dead.

In the later years of her life the masochism is tremendously increased. Two years before her death she offers herself as "a victim in a holocaust to divine love3." This idea takes up a large portion of this part of the book, and helped her to hasten to her death.

On the eve of Good Friday, eighteen months before she died, she had obtained permission to watch by the sepulchre of Christ until midnight. Such a situation would inevitably have stimulated her incestuous desires, and an haemoptysis which took place about an hour later was greeted with joy as an intimation of going to rejoin her "well-beloved in heaven." Next morning she mentioned what had happened, but made light of it and was allowed to continue fasting. The following night there was another haemoptysis which she regarded in the same light as the first, and no sort of remedy seems to have been given or any notice taken of it, and though later she was given treatment for a cough which she developed, she appears to have followed the severe rule of the convent as long as it was in any way possible for her to do so. As one reads the book one feels that the whole convent identified with her, and her phantasy became a communal phantasy.

The story of the last months of her life is unfortunately not by herself, and so the account of the phantasies underlying her actions is less complete, but we have one version of our phantasy which shows the increasing masochism of the last period5. "I know that God wants a little bunch

of grapes, that no one will offer Him....I pray...to the Virgin Mary to remind her son of his title of thief...so that he may not forget to come and steal me." Throughout the last months of her life she showed a particular devotion to the Virgin. One of the remarks reported from her last illness is1, "The devil torments me, I cannot pray, I can only look at the holy Virgin." Her last words were, "My God,...I love you?.” Her last action was to look towards and above the statue of the Virgin.

It is interesting to note that "Her great supernatural spirit enabled her to account herself happy to die in the arms of another Prioress (i.e. not her sister) in order to be able once more to practise faith in authority," or once more to repudiate the mother whilst retaining her3.

The chief mechanism involved in this phantasy seems to be a very complete identification with the mother, or even with the mother's genital organ1. The value of the phantasy is enormous. It enables Thérèse to have the incestuous relations with her father which she desires, and at the same time it serves as a reaction formation against the death wishes to her mother; but the purpose of the death wishes is fulfilled, because the mother has ceased to be an envied rival and has become a subservient intermediary. There is an exquisite irony in such a phrase as "the Queen of Heaven watched over her little flower," for the situation is "either you and I," or "neither you nor I." If her mother's jealousy forbids Thérèse gratifications with her father, her mother cannot have them either; if, on the other hand, her mother indulges in them, Thérèse as the genital organ is the chief beneficiary. But she is in no way to blame. She cannot help it if her mother is in heaven with her father. And so by living out her phantasy she attained a fairly happy solution to her conflicts.

4 This mechanism was put forward by Dr Ernest Jones when this paper was read before the British Psycho-Analytical Society. When I wrote the paper I thought it was a case of bisexuality, a strong homosexual component making it easy for Thérèse to shelter with her mother from her father, and it seems probable that her homosexual impulses would find satisfactions in the situation, and so help towards it, but in thinking the matter over I came to the conclusion that a much more important element was the identification suggested by Dr Ernest Jones, and he kindly gave me permission to incorporate his idea in this study.

Med. Psych. v

23

ABSTRACTS

The Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, vol. vi, May, 1925.

ISAAC M. ALTSHULER: The Psychopathology of Lying. "Nature," says the author, "resorts to falsehood," and gives as examples the spider spinning a web, a fox doubling on its track to 'fool' the hound, and the creatures who 'sham' death. Deception is a matter of self-preservation, an ego-urge. The child lies because it is physically weaker than the adult and by lying can develop a sense of security by bringing the grown-up to his own level of feebleness. The urge for lying is immense among children because they have so much in common with lower animals, and the pleasure in it is great because a great instinct (self-preservation) is gratified; lying is identified with self-preservation. The revolt of mankind against lying is explained on the ground that it reminds him of his feebleness. Imagination is the material of which a lie is composed; when the child grows up it acquires more experience of facts, "reality excludes imagination." Thus a child, having little experience, "lies apparently without reason." "When lying exceeds the permissible degree, we call it pathological lying." The author would dispense with the symptom-complex pseudologia phantastica' (he says it is found in "paranoia, imbecility, chronic alcoholism, psychoneuroses, hysteria and certain forms of sexual perversion") because it is so hard to differentiate from a 'normal' lie. There is no clinical evidence adduced to render this theory more acceptable than rival views which have the support of observation.

J. R.

Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. LXII, July, 1925. JENS CHR. SMITH: Atypical Psychoses and Heterologous Hereditary Taints. If heterologous hereditary characters are united, they will, in the descending line, entail the occurrence of a considerable number of psychoses, about one-half of which are purely segregated as the pure psychoses of the separate dispositions, i.e. as manic-depressive or schizophrenic as the case may be, whereas the other half present combinations of the various phenotypes in the theoretically imaginable ways. Perhaps the manic-depressive and the schizophrenic dispositions are not altogether mutually independent. The figures on which these conclusions are based are not large (19 family groups).

J. R.

Annales Medico-Psychologiques, Douzième Série, Tome 1er, February, 1925.

P. GUIRAUD ET M. SONN: Délire systématisé avec hallucinations visuelles et considérations sur la psychologie des délires. In chronic delirium there is almost complete syncytium with fusion of proximate elements. A well-marked feature in the case described is the presence of psycho-sensorial phenomena of a visual nature. Sketches and drawings are made representing the images which appear to the patient. In chronic delirium visual hallucinations are relatively infrequent but do occur.

Ibid. March, 1925.

E. MINKOWSKI: Troubles mentaux, complexes et constitution. A fairly detailed clinical report of four cases to demonstrate the differentiation of the epileptoid and the schizoid from the epileptic and the schizophrenic. In the cases described there is no repression of the Oedipus situation; there is an absence of censorship; the patients speak about incestuous relationships with a certain naïve cynicism. Some interesting observations are made as to the possibility of psycho-analysis in these cases. The author points out that it is necessary to mark out the indications and contra-indications for psychoanalytic treatment. In these epileptoid conditions psychotherapy can do little more than alleviate the symptoms. The writer discusses the effect of reading Freud's Introductory Lectures which a patient (a schizoid where the obsessional symptoms were only incidental) stated had cured him. In fact there was no change and at the most the reading could have given him some intellectual comfort.

A. STAROBINSKY: États de dépression et carrière médicale. Poses the question whether nervous symptoms are commoner in the medical than in other professions. The question is answered by the auto-description of a neurasthenic doctor's sufferings apparently a case of mild paranoia.

Ibid. April, 1925.

AUGUSTE WIMMER: Les troubles mentaux précurseurs de l'encéphalite épidémique clinique. Clinical histories of seven cases; when following an attack of influenza there ensued mental disturbances-in some cases melancholia and suicidal tendencies; in one case a marked loss of memory, in another apathy plus an anxiety state. The neurological symptoms appeared at varying intervals after the preliminary mental ones- -in one case not till five years later. The last case (apathy and anxiety) was followed, over a year later, by epilepsy.

Ibid. May, 1925.

H. COLIN: Charcot. A brief sketch of Charcot by the present editor of the Annales who was one of his pupils from 1887-1891 and was one of the weekly editors, with Jean Charcot and Blin, of the leçons du mardi. Charcot is presented as he appeared in family life among his friends and disciples.

PAUL COURBON: Charcot et la Psychiatrie. A summary of Charcot's chief services to psychiatry supported by quotations from his works.

H. CLAUDE ET G. ROBIN: L'indifférence et le negativisme schizomaniaques. Schizomania must be separated from dementia praecox with which it runs a danger of being identified if Bleuler's views on schizophrenia become accepted. The indifference and negativism shown in schizomania are very different, in motivation if not clinically, from what is seen in hebephrenic catatonia. In the latter there is absence of affect, in schizomania the affect is marked-it is a qualitative not a quantitative change. It is doubtful whether psychoanalysis, so often valuable in obsessional conditions, can help in schizomania, where the symptoms are a defence reaction against every attempt to get into touch with the external world; the condition is an outcome of the schizoid character.

M. D. EDER.