has always been troubled by the
"perseveration" of tactual images which had a strong feeling tone
and which were associated with seen or heard reports of the
experiences of others. For instance, when he read in a newspaper
that someone had hurt his hand with a pin, or that someone had cut
his foot on a nail, he immediately felt a not directly painful but
uncomfortable sensation at the particular place in the hand or in
the foot, together with a shrinking of the whole body and such
tactual sensation usually returned during the following days in
fainter and fainter form until it faded away. Most troublesome had
always been the reading of any torture processes in historical
books or in fiction. Yet there had never been a case in which the
sensations really had the vividness of hallucinations and never a
case in which the after effects had not disappeared at least in a
few weeks.

This time the effect had already lasted four months and it became
more and more troublesome. The patient had not the slightest fear
of mental disease and no anxiety, but he felt a very serious
disturbance by the instinctive effort to get rid of the intrusion.
The place of the disturbance was the wrists. The starting point was
a definite experience. On an unusually hot summer day the physician
had listened for a long time to the complaints of a female patient
who suffered vehemently from a nervous fear of scissors and knives
and who was afraid that she would cut her artery at the wrist. He
believes that it was the exhausting heat of the day which weakened
him to a point where the story of his patient affected him very
strongly and made him think of it all the time. Yet there was no
sensation element involved. A few hours later, he sat in a hotel at
his dinner. Just in front of him a butler started to carve a duck
with a long, sharp knife. In that moment he felt as if the knife
passed through the wrists of both arms. He felt for a moment almost
faint; arms and legs were contracted and an almost painful
sensation lingered in the skin, and did not disappear for hours.

From that day at the sight of knives or razors, not only in his
hands or his direct neighborhood, but also in a store and finally
in a picture, stirred up at once the optical image of that carving
knife cutti