Chapter X: In Conclusion 303 (5)

Then followed, in answer to further questions, a long series of reminiscences of the severe discipline imposed on her in earliest childhood by her father, a stern, hard man. As she related them, she seemed to feel again all the emotions that they had provoked--the shame, grief, fear, doubt, longing for sympathy. Literally, she lived through them anew, and to the trained understanding of the physician it was evident that she had never really forgotten them--although, in the waking state, she was able to recall her childhood only vaguely--but had subconsciously dwelt on them all her life, to the wrecking of her self-confidence, as well as the causing of her troubles of speech. Only by completely blotting them out, through psychotherapeutic means, could her restoration to health be effected.

Similarly, it has been found that emotional disturbances are at the bottom of stammering when it develops, not in childhood, but in adult life. A particularly instructive case, because of the insight it affords into the ingenuity with which the expert psychoanalyst gets at the truth in even the most complicated cases of functional nervous or mental disorder, is one that was successfully handled by Doctor A. A. Brill, already mentioned in these pages, a pupil of the pioneer Austrian psychoanalyst, Doctor Sigmund Freud. Doctor Brill's patient was a man who, after an early life untroubled by speech defect, had begun to stammer from no discernible cause, and had been stammering for a number of years before he consulted the New York specialist. Several weeks of psychoanalysis elicited nothing that would account for his trouble, and Doctor Brill was in much perplexity, until he one day noticed that the words on which his patient chiefly stammered were words beginning with or containing the letter "k." It occurred to him that this letter might have some significant association in the stammerer's mind, but the latter denied that it could have.

However, after psychoanalysis had proceeded further, Doctor Brill learned that there had been an event in the patient's life, though occurring some little time before the development of the stammering, that had made a most painful, even agonising, impression on him. He had been engaged to a young woman who had eloped with his closest friend; and this had so wrought on him that he had vowed never to utter her name again.

"And what was her name?" asked Doctor Brill.

The stammerer stared at him and burst into a violent tirade.

"Haven't I just told you," he cried, "that I have taken an oath never to speak it? What business is it of yours, anyway? What bearing can it have on my trouble of speech?"

"Only this bearing--that it may be the means of curing you. Come, now, I am sorry you have taken an oath, because you will have to break it and tell me the name."

"I'll die first."

With this he seized his hat and dashed out of the doctor's office in a frenzy of indignation. Doctor Brill did not see him again for a month. Then he returned, repentant. He would tell the name, he said, on condition that Doctor Brill did not write it down in the detailed record which, as is customary, he was making of the case. To this a prompt assent was given, and the troublesome name was as promptly made known. As Doctor Brill had expected, it began with K. He then said, leaning forward and showing his sheet of notes:

"See, I have kept my promise. I have called her Miss W. And, now, we'll soon have you quite well."

But on his next visit the patient was in despair. He was, he protested, stammering worse than ever. Words that had never given him any trouble before were now almost unpronounceable by him. On investigation, it turned out that they were, one and all, words in which the letter "w" had a place.

"At last," said Doctor Brill, "we know for a certainty what has made you stammer. It was the foolish oath you took, which served to sustain in your mind the memory of the terrible experience you went through on account of your faithless sweetheart. Vowing never to utter her name, yet thinking constantly of her, you have unconsciously made it difficult for you to utter even words in which the most prominent letter of that name--its initial--occurs. And, now, since she has become Miss W. to you, as well as Miss K., you are stammering on words with "w," as well as words with "k." We must free you from the torment of that vow and of the pent-up emotions that go with the forbidden name, and then you will never stammer more."

To this mode of dealing with stammerers could anything be in stronger contrast than the brutal Dieffenbach technique? The latter exemplifies, if in an extreme form, the folly of attempting--as is so often done, even to-day--to treat stammering on a basis of imperfect observation. The former shows the happy results that may be obtained when it is attacked in the light of thorough investigation. No; it is neither by the surgeon's knife nor by the use of mechanical appliances or physiological devices that stammering is to be really conquered, but by intelligent application of the wonderful remedial measures which modern medical psychology has worked out.

Stammering, to recapitulate, is not at bottom an anatomical or physiological trouble. Its individual peculiarities, varied as they are, all tend to prove that it is a mental malady, symptomatic of a psychoneurosis having its origin in subconscious emotional states. The rôle that heredity plays in it is merely to provide the soil in which it can flourish. Of wholly mental causation, it is curable by mental means, whether by faith in the efficacy of any method of treatment, however intrinsically worthless that method may be; by "suggestions" of a general character; or, if needful, by specific recall and eradication of the "forgotten memories" that underlie it.

Lest, however, I raise hope unduly, I would at once add that not even the most expert practitioners in psychoanalysis, or in any other psychological mode of treating stammering, are justified in guaranteeing an absolute or an "approximate" cure in every case. Experience is showing that the "emotional complexes" responsible for stammering are, in many cases, so deep-seated--and often so entangled in later complexes--that it is virtually impossible to get at them by any present-known method of mind tunnelling. And, in many other cases, the process of psychoanalysis is so slow and tedious that the stammerer is all too likely to lose heart and abandon the effort at cure.

Consequently, in respect to stammering, prevention becomes of more than usual importance. And the prevention of stammering, I trust I have already made amply clear, rests chiefly with parents. It is again primarily a question of guarding the young from needless emotional stresses, of early training to foster in children calmness, courage, self-confidence; so that, when inevitable shocks and trials come, they will have no power to overwhelm the mind and give birth to stammering or any other neurotic evil.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 13: It is important to recognise that certain organic diseases of the central nervous system do sometimes, through destructive action on the lower speech centres, cause incurable speech defect resembling stammering. Thus, a "stammerer" whom I referred to Doctor Coriat was found to be a victim, not of true stammering, but of the effects of a paralysis-causing organic disease experienced in early life. This condition, however, is of infrequent occurrence; and its presence can be readily determined by a neurologist.]

FAIRY TALES THAT HANDICAP

VIII

FAIRY TALES THAT HANDICAP

"Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh to torture him all his life long."

Thus said the famous Italian scientist, Angelo Mosso, a good many years ago. The facts of more recent research into the psychology and psychopathology of childhood, as reviewed in the preceding chapters, vindicate Professor Mosso's statement to an extent and in ways undreamed of by him. Nor is it only the emotionally disturbing things seen, heard, or experienced by children that may have a decisively adverse influence on their development. Harm may similarly and equally be done by the books and stories they read, even to the extent of provoking or accentuating nervous maladies. Particularly mischievous in this respect, because of their wide reading by children, are certain fairy tales which many parents--nay, I might say, nearly all parents--consider quite suitable for young readers.

You smile incredulously at the suggestion that a fairy tale could possibly affect a child harmfully. Still more preposterous seems to you the idea that the harmful effects of fairy tales--if such harmful effects actually occur--may be carried over into adult life. But, listen:

To the Doctor Brill of the letter "k" stammering case just narrated, there once came a young man of twenty-eight, afflicted with a strange and alarming malady.

"Doctor," he said, "I want your candid opinion as to what is the matter with me. Physically I feel well, but mentally I am badly off. In fact, I fear I am insane, and dangerously so. For a long time I have been tormented by a strange desire to bite and stab people and to torture them in all sorts of ways. I yearn for the times when everybody carried the dirk and dagger and could kill when offended. As yet I have restrained my mad impulse, but I am in terror lest I give way to it. Is there anything you can do to help me?"

The mere fact that he thus clearly recognised and candidly confessed his mental state was in itself a hopeful sign. But Doctor Brill was well aware that it might be extremely difficult to cure him, perhaps impossible. Everything would depend, in the first place, on whether the young man were actually insane or merely the victim of a psychoneurotic obsession. If the latter, there was a possibility of his being cured, provided the subconscious region of his mind could be explored with sufficient thoroughness to get at and root out the ideas underlying and responsible for his dangerous obsession. Satisfying himself that it actually was a case of psychoneurosis, Doctor Brill began the work of mental exploration. And, knowing that submerged ideas are pretty sure to reveal themselves, directly or indirectly, through the character of a person's dreams, he began by directing the young man to make a written record of his dreaming.

"Whenever you have a dream," he told him, "I want you to write it down as soon as you awake, and bring me an account of it."

Before long, Doctor Brill was in possession of a remarkable collection of dreams, many of which, as he had expected, were of an exceedingly unpleasant character. Analysing these dreams, a curious fact at once became evident--namely, that the patient's mental life was largely occupied with imaginings that related, not to the world of everyday existence, but to the people and events of mythology and fairy tale.

Always, too, in his subconscious imaginings, ideas of death and violence were uppermost. During the dream-analysis he recalled with special vividness such themes as the beheading of Medusa, the cruelties of Bluebeard, and the freezing to death of Eva, heroine of Bryant's "Little People of the Snows." Even trivial details in the settings of these and similar fairy tales were remembered and brought out in his dream-associations with a fulness that astonished the patient himself. Dr. Brill comments:

"He was very imaginative, so that the harrowing adventures enacted by fairies, genii, and Greek deities, on which he was constantly fed, were deeply interwoven with his own life, and he built up for himself a strange, archaic world. He liked to be alone, and often wandered away from his companions, to act through, in his own way, the adventures of which he had just heard or read.

"He himself traced the selection of his profession--that of an actor--to these boyish actions when he tried to imitate the fleet-footed Mercury, some character from fairyland or the "Arabian Nights," or some savage Indians. He thus imagined himself flying, and beheading monsters above the clouds, or penetrating to the centre of the earth in the form of some wicked magician, all the time passing through the most harrowing scenes. By a process of condensation, he fused ancient characters and episodes with persons and actions of reality, but his fancies usually began with some god-like or demon-like myth and gradually descended to human beings.

"During the first few weeks of the analysis he was in the habit of merging into a dreamy state while reproducing associations, and often became so excited that the work had to be temporarily interrupted."[14]

It was unnecessary to seek much further for the explanation of the obsession of torture. In large part, at all events, this was quite evidently the expression in consciousness of the gruesome images with which the patient's mind had been filled by the tales told him in his childhood. Though faded from conscious remembrance, they had remained with him subconsciously, to influence for evil the current of his conscious thoughts. Or, to put the matter tersely: Had tales of cruelty and violent death not been told him in his early days, he might never have been afflicted in manhood with his morbid longings to inflict pain.

Of course, if this case stood by itself it would be of no great significance. But the fact is that during the past few years--or since physicians began to appreciate the part played by childhood impressions in causing mental and nervous disease--evidence has been accumulating to indicate that the almost universal custom of telling fairy tales to children does entail grave risks to their character and their health. The child of normal nervous constitution is likely to be affected only in character; the supersensitive, neurotic child may be hurried, by the tales he hears or reads, into some more or less serious mental or nervous malady.

Let me hasten to add that this does not mean that the fairy tale should be entirely banished from the literature of childhood. It means only that parents should exercise more discrimination than they usually show in selecting fairy tales for their children. The rightly chosen fairy tale is indeed an almost indispensable aid in the early education of children, for reasons that are admirably summarised by an American educator, Mr. Percival Chubb, in these words:

"One value in fairy stories for the young is that they embody and commemorate the man-child's first rude assertion of the lordship of mind, and subserve the development of a later sense of spiritual freedom and autonomy. Another is that they are expressive, as all art is expressive, of the idealistic hunger at the heart of men. Again, as forms of art, they select and co-ordinate those facts which bring out the spiritual meanings of life. That is, they release from the unsifted materials of experience the imprisoned 'Soul of Fact.' And not only do they embody the basic moral insights and interpretations of childish man, but they express the simple and larger emotions, and so feed the heart of the child. They quicken, too, the imagination--that master-faculty without which the sympathy which is man's highest and richest endowment fails of fruition. They are an aid to culture by giving an outlook upon all nations and kindreds, all countries and conditions of life. Finally, along with their allied forms of literary invention, the myth, saga, fable, and so on, they are a condition to understanding the innumerable allusions with which the literature of the world is studded."[15]

All this is assuredly the function of the fairy tale, but frequently it is frustrated by the kind of fairy tales children are allowed to read. For one thing, the imaginative faculty is scarcely stimulated in a healthy fashion when the mind is led to dwell constantly, as in the case of Doctor Brill's patient, on thoughts of cruelty and pain. Nor can the fairy tale be said to have exerted a healthy influence in such a case as that represented by a little girl who was brought for treatment to another medical psychologist, and whose morbid irritability, disobedience, and crying spells were, by psychological analysis, traced to an excessive jealousy of her brother. In the course of the analysis the discovery was made that the girl had frequent dreams of seeing both her mother and her brother cruelly treated. In one dream, witches shut her mother in a cave to starve to death, and threw her brother into a large caldron of boiling water, leaving her to perish miserably.

"This dream," the little girl naïvely explained to the physician who was analysing her mental states, "is just like the fairy tales I read."

Other dreams of cruelty were likewise found to be drawn from the reading of unpleasant fairy tales. So that, although in this case jealousy was undoubtedly the chief cause of the nervous condition for which treatment was required, fairy tales also played a part in directing the course of the little girl's morbid thinking and her difficult behaviour. Warned by this revelation of the dream-analysis, her physician made it a point to notify her mother that unless steps were taken to change the girl's reading matter she might develop traits of character--harshness, coldness, indifference to the sufferings of others--that would handicap her throughout life.

Or, instead of causing an abnormal harshness, the fairy tale abounding in gory elements may breed an equally abnormal timidity, passing sometimes beyond the category of a character defect to that of positive disease. A typical instance is found in the experience of a young New York boy.

"Our son," his parents told the physician, to whom they took him for treatment, "has suddenly become excitable and nervous, afraid to go outdoors alone, and still more afraid to sleep alone. If left to himself after having been put to bed, he often wakes out of a sound sleep, shrieking for us. When we go to him he seems dazed, and for some moments does not recognise us. But he cannot tell us what has frightened him, and in the morning does not remember his alarm."

From this brief description the physician at once recognised that he had to deal with a case of what is technically known as _pavor nocturnus_, but better known to the lay public as "night terrors." Having had a thorough training in medical psychology, he was well aware that night terrors are grounded in disturbing experiences of the waking life. Accordingly, he questioned the parents closely.

Insistently they denied that anything had occurred to cause their son undue anxiety or alarm. Then the physician resorted to psychological analysis of the boy's mental states and, before long, made the discovery that his mind was full of frightful images of giants, wizards, and slimy monsters. Promptly he summoned the father and mother to a conference, and asked them:

"Have you been reading or telling fairy stories to your boy lately?"

"Why, yes," the mother replied. "He is passionately fond of them, and I tell him some every day."

"And what, may I ask, are the stories that you tell to him most frequently?"

"'Jack the Giant Killer' is one. He is also particularly fond of 'The Boy Who Did Not Know How to Shiver.'"

"Well, madam," said the physician, gravely, "I must ask you either to stop telling him fairy tales or to choose for him fairy tales with less gruesome elements in them. He is a boy of nervous temperament, and, figuratively speaking, he has been poisoned by the fear-images that are so abundant in the stories he has heard. Take him out into the open air, turn his thoughts to other things, and be more discreet in your choice of reading matter for him. Unless you do this, there is danger that he will yet suffer from something far more serious than night terrors."

The truth of this last statement may be concretely re-enforced by another citation from recent medical experience--the case, not of a young boy, but of a man of thirty, who came to Doctor Brill with a remarkable story.

"Ever since my boyhood," he related, "I have fainted at seeing blood. Now I feel weak and dizzy, and sometimes I faint outright, at anything which merely brings into my mind the thought of blood. I am afraid to talk to certain people because they are likely to speak about accidents which make me think of blood. The sight of a man who looks like a doctor suggests an operation, and at once I feel faint. On one occasion I fainted away while my blood pressure was being taken. It was not that I was afraid of having my blood pressure taken; it was simply that the word 'blood' brought on the usual attack. You do not appreciate the difficulty I have in telling you all this. Every time I mention the word to you I have to get a grip on myself. I fear I must seem very weak and foolish, but I cannot overcome the horror I feel. Unless you help me, I do not know what I shall do. I cannot go on this way indefinitely."

In answer to Doctor Brill's questions, he insisted nothing had occurred in his life that could give rise to his "phobia," or morbid dread of blood. He had been in no bad accident, had undergone no serious surgical operation, had witnessed no sanguinary scenes of any sort.

"Nevertheless," Doctor Brill assured him, "there is a logical reason for your abnormal fear. It is evidently buried deep in your mind; but there are ways of getting at it, and get at it we must."

Psychological analysis, patiently carried on for many days, ultimately brought the truth to light. His phobia, it appeared, had its real starting point in early childhood, and, not least, in certain sensational fairy stories read to him by a nurse when he was quite young--stories which he himself continued to read at a later age.

"These bloody and horrible stories," to quote Doctor Brill, "made a strong impression upon him. He would form fancies about them on going to sleep at night, substituting himself for the hero."

"Bluebeard" was one story that especially impressed him. Another was a charming tale about a false princess who was rolled in a barrel, into which long pointed spikes had been driven.

As he grew older, there had been the usual fading from memory of these stories and the imaginings to which they had given rise. But, subconsciously, they had never been forgotten, and out of them there had gradually developed the obsessive and seemingly inexplicable dread of blood.

In another case, the "Bluebeard" story responsible for the night terrors of a sensitive little girl, remained so indelibly fixed in her subconsciousness that in adult life she often had nightmares, in which, to her great distress, she was attacked by men who were "frightful looking on account of their blue beards." Even more impressively illustrative of the permanence and possible ill effects of tales of the horrible heard in early life is the case of a man fifty years old, who had to receive medical treatment because he "could not fall asleep without living through--for at least an hour, sometimes even longer--some distorted story from fairy books or mythology."

That common phobia of childhood, fear of the dark, is often traceable to fairy tales, and, in many cases, persists in some degree through later life. Let me quote, on this important point, the testimony of a Washington physician, Doctor T. A. Williams, who has made a special study of nervousness in childhood:

"Morbid fears are a great distress to many people. They have nearly always arisen in early childhood, and have been inculcated by injudicious nurses, tales of goblins and fairies being most prolific in this respect.

"The ineradicability of fears, when inculcated in early childhood, is clearly illustrated by a Southern lady who, even in advanced age, dared not go alone into the dark, although she had long ceased to believe in the stories which had made her afraid to do so. She realised this so forcibly that she would not permit her three daughters to be told any of the alarming stories which most Southern children learn. This resulted in the girls never having known what it meant to be afraid of the dark. Indeed, it was the habit of their school fellows to send them off into dark and eery places to show off their powers."

And, from one of the most experienced psychiatrists of the United States, Doctor W. A. White, superintendent of the great Government Hospital for the Insane, at Washington, we have this emphatic statement as to the general relationship between fairy tales and mental diseases:

"You will find, not infrequently, that the precipitating factors in psychoses come from the books of fairy tales which your children are allowed to feed upon."

Of course, as already intimated, a mental overthrow from the hearing or reading of fairy tales presupposes an undue impressionability on the victim's part. But how are parents to determine whether or no their children's psychic make-up is such as to render them immune from the possible mind-enfeebling effects of "horror tales"? And, in any event, let me repeat with all the emphasis at my command, there is reason to believe that no child can escape some stunting or distorting of character if brought up on a diet of ultra-sanguinary fairy tales.

As I write these lines, a stupendous war is raging in Europe with a ferocity that appals the outside world. Especially atrocious is the policy of one of the embattled nations, formerly regarded as a leader in modern civilisation. To attain its ends, this nation has violated treaty obligations as though they were of no consequence whatever; it has ruthlessly slain innocent noncombatants, even the citizens of neutral countries; wherever it has been victorious, it stands accused of vile brutalities. In its attitude towards its own soldiers it has displayed an almost incredible callousness, hurling them to certain destruction with cold-blooded nonchalance.

Beholding all this, the people of other lands marvel and question. That, in the twentieth century, even under the stress of war, a civilised nation should thus revert to barbarism seems to baffle explanation. For myself, however, I am convinced that at least a partial explanation is to be found in the fact that the offending nation is one among whom the myth, the legend, and the fairy tale have pre-eminently flourished.

In the stories which distinguished scholars have eagerly assisted to make available to the youth of this nation, indifference to human suffering and human life are too often conspicuous elements. Too often they are tinged by more than a suggestion of bloodthirstiness, cruelty, and the principle of revenge. When the childish mind has been fed upon these, stimulated by them to unhealthy fancies, and re-enforced in those instincts inherited from the primitive, which it should be the business of education to weaken and repress, is it to be wondered at that, in the crisis of war, there has been a veritable relapse to primitive savagery?

In some degree, moreover, all the warring nations have been bred on fairy tales, and, in some degree, all have exhibited the same tendency to the cruel ways of primitive man. Throughout the world a fairy tale reform is needed for the development and maintenance of a true civilisation.

But, mark you, it is a reform that is needed, not a banishment of the fairy tale. As some one has well said, a child who never hears a fairy tale is developing a tract in his soul that, in later life, will grow barren. More than this, cases are on record indicating that unless the child's instinctive craving for the romantic and the ideal is satisfied by well-chosen fairy tales, he may gratify this craving in ways that shock his elders.

I will give one instance, by way of concrete illustration. For knowledge of this I am indebted to President Hall, of Clark University, and I give it in President Hall's own words:

"Two immigrants in New York brought up their daughter, born here, on a diet of literal truth, and tabooed fiction, poetry, and imagination as lies. She was bright, at twelve had never read a fairy tale or a story book, but was continually dreamy and ardent-souled, with a great passion and talent for music. Her mother once told her that she might, perhaps, play some time to the President. Soon after, at the dedication of Grant's Tomb, she saw Mr. and Mrs. McKinley. One day, soon afterwards, she rushed in, breathless, saying that they had visited her school, heard her play, might adopt her, would give papa a place in Washington, and so on; but Mrs. McKinley was out of funds, and her husband was in Washington.

"Accordingly, Gertrude's father drew a hundred from his fortune of fourteen hundred dollars in the bank and sent it by his daughter, who brought back costly flowers. Upon more excuses, more money was loaned, and more presents were sent to Gertrude's parents--a canary, a puppy, a diamond ring. Gertrude conversed intelligently on political topics, and her father gave up his position, as he was about to accept a five-thousand-dollar job in Washington.

"Then came the crash. Gertrude had never met the President or his wife, but had made lavish presents and had bought many articles, which she had stored with a neighbour; and, to her parents' especial horror, had laid in a large stock of fairy tales and other fiction."

With justification, President Hall adds: "This points a moral against the pedagogic theory that would starve the imagination."[16]

In truth, the cultivation of the imaginative faculty by means of the fairy tale is one of the great opportunities of parenthood. Only see to it that the fairy tales employed for this purpose do not reek of brutality and gore, of treachery and cunning.

And see to it that elements like these are not unduly conspicuous in any other kind of tales you put into the hands of your children. Give them no books to read, tell them no stories that may react on a sensitive mind to the development either of callousness or fear. Be careful even with regard to the tales you tell your children in the course of their religious education. Dwell on the rewards of goodness rather than on the punishments of sin. In the religious instruction of the young, as in all other instruction, over-emphasis on the grim and the terrifying may have unfavourable consequences, persisting to the end of life.

Recall, if you please, the case of the overworked Boston young man, mentioned in "Psychology and Parenthood" (p. 273). Obsessed with an idea that he had committed "the unpardonable sin," he was surely drifting to some institution for the insane, when he was fortunate enough to come under the care of a physician familiar with the new psychological discoveries and methods. Recall this young man's autobiographical statement, given to his physician, after the latter had helped him back to health:

"My abnormal fear certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly woman who taught Sunday-school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if I was not good enough to be saved."

You are careful as to the food you give your child's body. Be no less careful as to the food you give his mind.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 14: _The New York Medical Journal_, March 21, 1914.]

[Footnote 15: Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1905, p. 871 _et seq._]

[Footnote 16: "Educational Problems," vol. i, pp. 359-360.]

"NIGHT TERRORS"

IX

"NIGHT TERRORS"

Reference has already been made more than once, though only in an incidental way, to the childhood malady of _pavor nocturnus_, or "night terrors." In any book like the present one the subject of night terrors is deserving of detailed discussion. Not only do night terrors constitute a real handicap of childhood, but also they constitute a handicap, the seriousness of which is not yet appreciated by many people, and the true nature of which is as yet known to exceedingly few. In some quarters, indeed, there has been a disposition to minimise this malady, because it usually is "outgrown" by the eighth or ninth year. But, in reality, its effects--or, rather, the effects of the condition of which it is a sign--may, and often do, continue through life. Fortunately, the new knowledge that psychology has gained concerning it enables parents to frustrate its evil consequences and, in most cases, to prevent its occurrence.

At bottom, night terrors are almost identical with the nightmares of adult years. They are, to put it precisely, juvenile nightmares, with the added feature of profound disturbance in the waking state. The one real point of difference between night terrors and nightmares is that the former indicate a greater degree of nervous strain. The child who is a victim of night terrors generally has an hour or so of quiet sleep after going to bed. Then he wakes, shrieking for his mother. When the parents, alarmed, rush to his room, they are likely to find him out of bed, crouching behind a chair, or in the corner. His eyes are staring and full of horror. He seems not to recognise his parents, though he will eagerly clutch at them for protection. After a few minutes the attack passes off, he quiets down, returns to bed, and sleeps soundly until morning, when, as a rule, he has no conscious remembrance of his fears of the night before.

While the night terror is at its height the child may have ghastly hallucinations, representing a continuance in the waking state of the dream-images that have distressed him. Also, instead of leaping out of bed, he may merely sit up, or may find it impossible to move at all, as is the case with many adults when coming out of a nightmare. A Chicago physician, describing his experiences as a child, relates:

"When I was five years of age, and during the sixth year, I suffered from nightmare. I sat up in bed and fancied I saw a monkey come down the chimney and fasten itself to my shoulder and bite me, and terrify me so that I would scream out. My older sister would then come, wake me up thoroughly, and satisfy me that it was but a vision.

"Other nights I would feel a sense of oppression, ringing in ears, a sensation of perceiving something very small, which, gradually at first, and then rapidly, assumed enormous proportions and vast whirling speed, and which, I imagined, whirled me off with it--a buzzing in my ears, probably. Then would I feel that animals--rats--would creep over me and press heavily upon me, and I could neither move hand nor foot, nor speak."

The reference to the buzzing in the ears is typical of the attitude that until lately has been taken by almost all physicians in respect both to adult and to juvenile nightmares. For that matter, it still is the attitude of those physicians who are not familiar with the findings of medical psychology. Nightmare to them, whether in the old or in the young, is altogether a question of physical causation. As they see it, one need not look beyond bodily conditions of some sort to understand the nightmares of adults and the night terrors of children. Accordingly, treatment by sedatives, dieting, and hygienic measures has been the rule. Unfortunately, this by no means always succeeds in bringing about the desired result, although such measures undoubtedly do benefit the general health.

Seemingly, to be sure, they are especially successful in the case of night terrors. But it is significant that, even if left untreated, night terrors seldom persist beyond the period of childhood. Then, however, those who have had them show a tendency, in many cases, to be troubled by unpleasant dreams, often taking on the character of most distressing nightmares. The frequency of these may, or may not, be diminished by the usual treatment of a dietetic sort. On the other hand, observation has shown that many persons afflicted with the indigestion and other physical conditions commonly held responsible for nightmares are not troubled by nightmare at all. As one observer puts it, even a person whose stomach is half destroyed by cancer may commit all sorts of dietary indiscretions and not suffer from nightmare in the slightest.

Evidently, then, physical conditions do not of themselves account for nightmares and night terrors. One must look elsewhere for their ultimate cause. This is what the medical psychologists have done, and, doing this, they have discovered that the children who are troubled by night terrors are always children of a sensitive nervous organisation who have been subjected to emotional stress. A child may be nervously highstrung, yet entirely escape night terrors, provided his mind be kept free from emotional upheavals. But let anything occur to disturb him emotionally in an excessive degree and he at once becomes likely to suffer, not only from night terrors, but also--as it has been a prime purpose of this book to impress convincingly on every reader--from nervous affections of a more serious kind. He may even have "day terrors," seeing imaginary and terrifying objects as vividly as the child who wakes in panic from a distressing dream.

For example, a boy of eight was sent to the Washington neurologist, Doctor T. A. Williams, to be treated for general nervousness, and, in particular, for a tendency "to see things where there is really nothing to be seen." Doctor Williams found the boy to be so nervous that it was hard for him to sit still and to keep from wriggling excitedly about in his chair. Questioned as to his hallucinations, he said that these were mostly of a snake. He could not describe the imaginary snake, except to say that its head was like an eel's. It seemed to come from nowhere, and presented itself to his astonished gaze with a suddenness that caused him to scream and run. His father gave Doctor Williams the additional information that these hallucinations were experienced only when the boy was alone, and that, though his day terrors were not followed by night terrors, he would not go to bed unless some one were in the room with him.

Questioning his little patient more closely, Doctor Williams next learned that he had a veritable horror of being alone at any time. As long as somebody was in sight, he could enjoy his games, and would readily run errands. Left alone, the imaginary snake, or some hallucinatory wild beast, was almost at once seen by him. Further inquiry brought out the significant fact that this fear of solitude had actually been implanted in the boy by over-anxiety on his mother's part.

His horror of being alone was paralleled by her dread of having him out of her sight. She was continually thinking, and talking, of risks he would incur if he were allowed to be by himself. In this way she had unconsciously infected him with a "fixed idea" that something dreadful was sure to happen to him unless older persons were at hand to protect him. This fixed idea preying on his unusually impressionable mind, and keeping him in a constant state of emotional strain, was the decisive factor in the production of his day terrors. In proof whereof it need only be added that his hallucinations and general nervousness ceased to trouble him soon after corrective training was begun, supplemented by treatment by "suggestion" to rid him of the abnormal fear of being alone.

Fortunately, though I might detail a number of other cases of day terrors, this affliction is of rare occurrence, compared with night terrors. And, from the point of view of the medical psychologist, it is only to be expected that such should be the case. As explained by Doctor Williams, in a passage which gives a clear idea of the mechanism of night terrors:

"If I say to a small boy that a bear will eat him up, the effect upon his emotions entirely differs, whether I make the remark with portentous gravity and horror, or whether I say it with bubbling joviality as, evidently, a huge joke. In the first eventuality, the boy will rush to my side in terror and try to be saved from the bear, and a phobia is in course of construction; with the latter proceeding, the boy will laugh consumedly, and it would not take much to make him enter the cage and strike the bear. But, even when terrified, a child feels a refuge in the protection of his elders during the day, when they are rarely absent....

"At night, however, the child is alone, and his little consciousness cannot find the support of others. Before the kaleidoscope of his dreams pass the various images and accompanying emotions of his waking life, so that if any of these images has become linked with fear it is certain to bring with it terror, as it surges into dream in the night, and the child jumps up, awakened, in panic, finding no one near, upon whom to lean."[17]

In many a case of night terrors, no great psychological skill is required to detect the influence of emotional stress as the prime factor in causing the alarming attacks. In one instance that has come to my knowledge, a seven-year-old girl was brought to a physician, with a history of both night and day terrors. She was subject, her mother said, to attacks of loud screaming, during which she seemed dazed and in an agony of fear. The attacks sometimes lasted ten minutes, and immediately afterwards the girl generally fell into a heavy sleep. Her night terrors were of the usual sort, except that on the occasion of the first attack she was in such a panic that she opened her bedroom window and threw herself out of it. Luckily, it was early evening, and her mother, walking in the garden beneath her window, was able to catch her and save her from harm.

"She had gone to bed as usual," the mother said, in detailing this episode, "and seemed to be quite well, though I remember I thought she looked a little wild about the eyes. For an hour she slept quietly. Then, as I later learned, she woke up moaning, jumped out of bed, and made for the window."

"And," asked the physician to whom the child had been taken, "had anything out of the way occurred to her that day?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Well, nothing of real account, at all events. I have been told that somebody jokingly said to her that if she were not a good girl a black man would come to her room and carry her off. But this did not seem to disturb her much at the time."

Hereupon, the situation became clear to the physician. It was evident that, subconsciously if not consciously, the thought of the supposed danger, acting on a mind none too well organised by inheritance--there was epilepsy in the family--had acquired sufficient force to bring on the attack of nocturnal panic and the subsequent attacks of day and night terrors. Probably, moreover, this was not the first time that statements of a fear-inspiring character had been made to the child, so that this last "joke" might well serve to agitate her excessively.

Compare with this the case of a four-year-old boy, whose night terrors were accompanied by a strange hallucination that he saw the devil, and that the devil was trying to catch him. Every night for several weeks he would wake after one or two hours of sleep, would leap from bed with a shriek, and run wildly around the room, calling on his mother to save him and to drive the devil out of the house.

Impressed by the recurrence of this hallucination, the physician in charge of the case questioned the boy's mother as to a possible explanation for his believing the devil was chasing him. Reluctantly, the mother confessed that one day when her little son had been unruly she had warned him that if he did not behave the devil would come for him. It was the night after she had thus foolishly threatened him that he had his first attack of _pavor nocturnus_. Armed with this knowledge, the physician began a course of treatment which effected a cure in a week. It properly included tonics and dieting to overcome the indigestion and other physical ailments caused by the strain of nervous excitement. But its principal feature was treatment by suggestion, to dislodge from the boy's mind his morbid fear of the devil.

Anything which causes the instinct of fear to function abnormally may act with decisive force in bringing on night terrors. The telling of ghost stories and other gruesome tales of the supernatural has been productive of much harm in this respect. And, as brought out in the preceding chapter, cases of night terrors have similarly been traced to the hearing or reading by children of fairy tales containing elements of the horrible. The child that is supersensitive may be so impressed by these elements as to brood over them and, in waking reverie, apply them to himself. Thus they get fixed in the mind, to disturb and alarm it, and, eventually, to find expression in dreams of so unpleasant a character that night terrors may be a result.

With the night terrors left untreated psychologically, subsequent nervous ailments, perhaps lifelong invalidism, may further penalise the hapless victim of parental thoughtlessness. I am reminded of a certain patient of Doctor Sidis's, a woman afflicted with neurotic ills up to the age of sixty, and, when she first consulted the New England specialist, displaying a most complicated set of disease symptoms. She had kidney trouble, stomach trouble, frequent headaches, insomnia, and general nervousness. In especial, she suffered from an obsessive fear of becoming insane. This fear, at times, was so extreme that she would walk up and down her room night after night, "like an animal in a cage," to use Doctor Sidis's expressive phrase. Repeated examinations by different physicians had failed to bring to light any evidences of organic disease of stomach, kidneys, or brain, and a diagnosis of hysteria had finally been made. Consequently, it became Doctor Sidis's special task to endeavour to get at these latent memory-images that had acted with disintegrative power on the mental and bodily processes, recall them to conscious remembrance, and, by suggestive treatment, rob them of their disease-producing potency.

Step by step, by a method of psychological analysis of his own invention, he took his patient back through her life history. He found that, in middle life, she had had several distressing experiences, but none of them adequate to account for her hysteria. Always, there remained an obscure element which did not become clearly outlined until, in the course of the analysis, childhood memories began to emerge. Then it appeared that there had been a period of night terrors, the source of which was definitely traced to a shock experienced at the age of five. At that age, through some mischance, the patient had been allowed to spend some time with an insane woman who was in a maniacal state.

Of a sensitive nervous organisation to begin with, she was overwhelmed by this experience. She could not get the image of the insane woman out of her mind, and the fearful thought kept coming again and again to her, "Do little girls ever go insane?" Then followed the night terrors, to be "outgrown" in due course. But the analysis revealed that, though the memory of her experience with the insane woman had gradually faded from conscious recollection, it had never been subconsciously forgotten. Even now, fifty-five years later, she still saw this woman in her dreams. It was the baneful influence of this shock that had given rise to her obsessive fear of insanity and had prepared the ground for the condition of abnormal suggestibility making possible the hysterical imitation of organic kidney and stomach disease. As was proved by the outcome of Doctor Sidis's psychotherapeutic treatment.

Now the question comes: If night terrors are so portentous a danger-signal, how prevent the development of the mentally disturbed and nervously strained condition which they indicate? This question has, perhaps, been sufficiently answered in previous chapters. Here I would simply reaffirm that emotional control is the great object to be kept steadily in view. It is, indeed, significant that night terrors are most likely to appear in children having a nervous, excitable father or mother. The emotionality, the chronic worrying and anxiety of the parent infect the child by the power of psychic contagion and make him fall an easy prey to any disquieting experience.

And if, despite well-ordered moral training and the benign influence of a good parental example, the child shows a tendency to develop night terrors--what then? Well, here is how one psychologically enlightened parent nipped in the bud a fear-bred condition that might have resulted in night terrors or in some specific nervous ailment of the waking life:

"For several weeks my boy, three and a half years old, had been visiting the zoölogical garden every afternoon, in the company of a French maid of exceptionally forceful character, and apparently free from the superstitiousness of the average nurse. For a long time all went well, until one evening the boy began to cry soon after he was left for the night. At this unusual occurrence, I mounted the stairs and inquired the cause of the boy's trouble.

"He said there were lions in the house and that he did not want to stay alone, as he was afraid they would eat him. The source of the idea had been that the lions had roared more loudly than usual on that particular afternoon, and he had been much impressed, standing for some time quite motionless before the cage, though terrified. I soon convinced the boy that the lions had to remain in their cages, and could not get out; hence, there were none in the house, so that there was no occasion to fear. Of course, it was first necessary to give him the feeling of security gained by embracing me; and, secondly, to begin the conversation by talking of something else--I have forgotten what.

"In this way the state of terror was dismissed, and the feeling of protection was induced before we returned to the subject of the lions. Then we made rather a joke of the funny roaring of the lions before we had finished, and he finally lay down, with the solemn purpose to go to sleep and think, as I suggested, of the tramcars and motors passing outside his open window. It was all very simple substitution, but it was the prevention of what might have become a serious fear-psychosis if injudiciously handled."[18]

It should be added that special need for training in emotional control is indicated if a child begins to be troubled, not by night terrors, but by another and more common childhood malady--somnambulism. The child who talks or walks in his sleep, like the child attacked by night terrors, is, for some reason, nervously unstrung; and, it may confidently be said, is usually unstrung because of the presence in his mind of disquieting ideas, conscious or subconscious. On this account, the parent should not be satisfied with the measures ordinarily employed in dealing with both night terrors and somnambulism--the prescribing of tonics and sedatives, outdoor exercise, abstinence from tea and coffee, reduction in meat in the diet, and so forth. Undeniably, these measures often result in a complete cessation of the nocturnal symptoms. But, even if, as a result of medication, exercise, and dieting, the disquieting ideas causing the symptoms no longer manifest their presence by the attacks that have alarmed the parents, these ideas still are left in the mind, perchance to cause still more alarming symptoms later. Accordingly, the really prudent parent, besides dieting his child, will endeavour to get at the mental source of trouble.

Sometimes he can do this by closely observing the behaviour of the child in his waking moments, and the trend of his waking thoughts. Or he can do it by gaining the child's confidence and questioning him as to any fears, worries, or griefs that may be disturbing him. If, as will often happen, the child insists, it may be in all sincerity, that nothing is troubling him, there is yet another avenue of information open to the parent--namely, by questioning the child about his dreams. Through studying his dreams, in fact, it is possible to gain clearer insight into his mental life than perhaps by any other means.

Again and again, as we have seen, the modern psychologist has made use of dream-analysis with illuminating results. Parents can and should similarly analyse their children's dreams. And I feel justified in predicting that parents of the future, alert to detect and correct any undesirable trends in their children's mental and moral development, will make frequent use of dream-analysis as an aid in successful child-rearing.