d be retching and vomiting, although she herself
recognized the fact that there was nothing the matter with her
stomach.

Part of the time her fear was a general terror of some unknown thing,
and part of the time it was a specialized fear of great intensity. She
was afraid she would choke her son, to whom she was passionately
devoted. During the course of the treatment, which followed the lines
of psycho-analysis to be described in the next chapter, I found that
this fear had arisen one evening when she was lying reading by the
side of her sleeping child. Suddenly, without warning, she had a sort
of mental picture of her own hands reaching out and choking the boy.
Naturally she was terrified. She jumped out of bed, decided that she
was losing her mind and went into a hysterical state which her husband
had great trouble in dispelling. After that she was afraid to be left
alone with her children lest she should kill them.

During the analysis it was discovered that what she had been reading
on that first night was the thirteenth verse of the ninety-first
Psalm. "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder. The young lion
and the dragon thou shalt trample under foot." To her the adder meant
the snake, the tempter in the Garden of Eden, and hence sex. What she
wanted to choke was her own insistent sex urge of which the child was
the symbol and the result. On later occasions she had the same sort of
hallucinations in connection with another child and on sight of a
brutish kind of man who symbolized to the subconscious mind the
sex-urge, of which she was afraid. Not so much by what her mother had
said as by what she had avoided saying, and by her expression whenever
the subject was mentioned, had she given her little daughter a
fundamentally wrong idea of the reproductive instinct. Later when the
girl was woman grown she still clung to the old conception, deploring
the sex-part of the marriage relation and feeling herself too refined
to be moved by any such sensual urge. But the strong sex-instinct
within her would not be downed. It was so insistent as to be an object
of terror to her repressing instinct, which could not bring itself to
acknowledge its presence. The fear that came to the surface was merely
a disguised and symbolic representation of this real fear which was
turning her life into a nightmare.

The nausea and vomiting in this woman seemed to be symbolic of the
disgust which she felt subconsciously at the tho