and en rapport with his surroundings. The struggle was considerably milder, but he did gymnastics, practised the arts, and made good his deficiencies; then followed the dreamy stage with the love-songs, corresponding to the period of victory in the first psychosis. In this state, according to his own words, he had a dreamlike feeling as if he stood upon the borders of two worlds and knew not whether truth stood on the right or on the left. He told me, “It is said she is married, but I believe she is not, but is still waiting for me; I feel that it must be so. It is ever to me as if she were not married, and as if success were yet attainable.”
Our patient here portrayed but a pale copy of the scene in the first attack of psychosis, when he, the victor, stood before his mistress. In the course of a few weeks after this conversation the scientific interests of the patient again began to predominate. He spoke with obvious unwillingness about his intimate life, he repressed it more and more, and finally turned away from it as if it did not belong to himself. Thus gradually the gate of the under-world became closed. There remained nothing but a certain tense expression, and a look which, though fixed on the outer world, was turned inwards at the same time; and this alone hinted at the silent activity of the unconscious, preparing new solutions for his insoluble problem. This is the so-called cure in dementia praecox.
Hitherto we psychiatrists used not to be able to suppress a laugh when we read an artist’s attempts to portray a psychosis. These attempts have been generally regarded as quite useless, for the writer introduces into his conception of the psychosis psychological relationships quite foreign to the clinical picture of the disease. But the artist has not simply proceeded to copy a case out of a psychiatric text-book; he knows as a rule better than the psychiatrist.
The case which I have sketched is not unique, it is typical of a whole class for which the artist Spitteler has created a model of universal validity; the model is Imago. I may take for granted that you know all about that case. The psychological gulf, however, between the creation of the artist and the insane person remains great. The world of the
