“My aim was to show that the symptoms of mental diseases also had a human meaning.” (C.G. Jung)
Case about a seventy-five-year-old patient,
making “mysterious movements” for almost 50 years
“The case concerned an old patient in the women’s ward. She was about seventy-five and had been bedridden for forty years. Almost fifty years ago she entered the institution, but there was no one left who could recall her admittance; everyone who had been there had since died. Only one head nurse, who had been working at the institution for thirty-five years, still remembered something of the patient’s story. The old woman could not speak, and could only take fluid or semi-fluid nourishment. When not eating, she made curious rhythmic motions with her hands and arms. I did not understand what they meant. I was profoundly impressed by the degree of destruction that can be wrought by mental disease, but saw no possible explanation. At the clinical lectures she used to be presented as a catatonic form of dementia praecox, but that meant nothing to me, for these words did not contribute in the slightest to the understanding of the significance and origin of those curious gestures … Late one evening, as I was walking through the ward, I saw the old woman still making her mysterious movements and again asked myself, “Why must this be?” Thereupon I went to our old head nurse and asked whether the patient had always been that way. “Yes”, she replied. “But my predecessor told me she used to make shoes.” I then checked through her yellowing case history once more, and sure enough, there was a note to the effect that she was in the habit of making cobbler’s motions. In the past shoemakers used to hold shoes between their knees and draw the threads through the leather with precisely such movements. When the patient died shortly afterwards, her elder brother came to the funeral. “Why did your sister lose her sanity?” I asked him. He told me that she had been in love with a shoemaker who for some reason had not wanted to marry her and that when he finally rejected her, she had “gone off”. The shoemaker movements indicated an identification with her sweetheart which had lasted until her death.” (C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections)