ABSTRACT
During the first years of the analysis, as I have said, there was an increasing preoccupation with the idea that the E.C.T. had caused some physical injury, that ‘something was wrong with her brain’. She was continually trying to clarify in words the feeling of what was wrong, and eventually part of this effort crystallized into the sense of acute tension at the back of her neck. She also began to complain that her head joggled about. At first, in fact for several years, she could not explain farther or let me see it happen, but very gradually she became able to attend sufficiently to tell me something of what she felt was going on. Instead of her usual reaction of blind terror at the idea that there was any happening in her body that she was not in complete control of, she now became able to say that she thought the headjoggling was a result of trying to hold her head still, for when she relaxed this effort to keep it still it turned away to the left: in fact away from me, since I sat slightly to the right of the head of the couch while she, most often, sat up on it so that she could keep an eye on me, she said. She became increasingly frightened of this new symptom, terrified that anyone should see it. I had at first tried to interpret the panic about it in terms of fear of any force in herself which would work towards breaking through the rigidity of her determination to be always in conscious control – in fact, as perhaps a move towards greater spontaneity – but this only led her to rage at me in what seemed like a mixture of terror and fury, saying, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ At times like these it did seem that verbal interpretations were
of no use to her, for she would be like a child in a night terror, she would groan about how terrible she felt, raging at me for not making her better, but nothing I could say seemed to reach her. Very often, especially in the early years, she would come in a state of acute indecision, caught up in a swing between two alternatives of action, and totally unable to weigh the pros and cons of one possibility against the other or come to a choice which discarded the least useful course of action. Thus, when eventually she was able to observe that the head-joggling was an attempt to stop the involuntary turning of her head away, I began to think of it partly in terms of the specific indecision over whether to relate to the world, me, or to turn away. It was this thought that led me to guess that what she had called her first conscious daydream, brought to me in November 1946, could be related to the problem of the ‘head-joggling’ symptom.
