3020

A patient of Tausk’s, a girl who was brought to the clinic after a quarrel with her lover, complained that her eyes were not right, they were twisted. This she herself explained by bringing forward a series of reproaches against her lover in coherent language. ‘She could not understand him at all, he looked different every time; he was a hypocrite, an eye-twister,¹ he had twisted her eyes; now she had twisted eyes; they were not her eyes any more; now she saw the world with different eyes.’

The patient’s comments on her unintelligible remark have the value of an analysis, for they contain the equivalent of the remark expressed in a generally comprehensible form. They throw light at the same time on the meaning and the genesis of schizophrenic word-formation. I agree with Tausk in stressing in this example the point that the patient’s relation to a bodily organ (the eye) has arrogated to itself the representation of the whole content. Here the schizophrenic utterance exhibits a hypochondriac trait: it has become ‘organ-speech’.

A second communication by the same patient was as follows: ‘She was standing in church. Suddenly she felt a jerk; she had to change her position, as though somebody was putting her into a position, as though she was being put in a certain position.’

Now came the analysis of this through a fresh series of reproaches against her lover. ‘He was common, he had made her common, too, though she was naturally refined. He had made her like himself by making her think that he was superior to her; now she had become like him, because she thought she would be better if she were like him. He had given a false impression of his position; now she was just like him’ (by identification), ‘he had put her in a false position’.

The physical movement of ‘changing her position’, Tausk remarks, depicted the words ‘putting her in a false position’ and her identification with her lover. I would call attention once more to the fact that the whole train of thought is dominated by the element which has for its content a bodily innervation (or, rather, the sensation of it). Furthermore, a hysterical woman would, in the first example, have in fact convulsively twisted her eyes, and, in the second, have given actual jerks, instead of having the impulse to do so or the sensation of doing so: and in neither example would she have any accompanying conscious thoughts, nor would she have been able to express any such thoughts afterwards.

¹ [The German ‘Augenverdreher’ has the figurative meaning of ‘deceiver’.]