ABSTRACT
It is not often that one has the opportunity of analysing a patient who fights with a 'ghost' during the course of treatment, and so the author thought the case merited clinical discussion. The author shall have little to say about the theoretical aspects of hallucinatory phenomena, but there are grounds for a discussion about various parameters that he used during the analysis. Elizabeth Zetzel in her paper 'The So-called Good Hysteric' (1968), which mainly concerns women patients, made a useful classification of hysterical patients into four grades according to their psychopathology and prospects of analysability. Finally, the author quotes the nursery rhyme from the beginning of Zetzel's paper. The second and third lines even contain the mechanism of displacement upwards: There was a little girl, And she had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead, And when she was good, She was very, very, good, But when she was bad, She was horrid.
