527 B. Nervous troubles in adults have often been cured by the same means. Thus, in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, September 1899, P- 73, Dr. Vlavianos records a case of tic convulsif cured by hypnotic suggestion.

Jeanne A., twenty-five years old, strong - nothing special to note in her parents' or in her own personal antecedents. Her tic is the first disease which she has had. It began three and a half years before Dr. V. saw the patient. Her parents noticed that she often shook her head as if in the usual gesture of denial. She was quite unconscious of it. Her attention having been drawn to this movement, it became conscious, but involuntary. She endeavoured without success to inhibit it. If for a time she succeeded, the tic would reappear in quick succession as if to make up for loss of time. Under the influence of emotion the tic was twice suspended for some months. On the first occasion this occurred apparently as a result of the joy and excitement of attending her first ball. On the second, after a great fright produced by a severe scalding. No hysteria, no sign of degeneration, physical or psychical. Hypnotic suggestion and appropriate gymnastic exercises removed the tic at the end of three sittings.

Wetterstrand has used the same method with success (loc. cil.,p. 76). See also Janet, Névroses et Idées Fixes, vol. ii. part ii. ch. iii., "Les Tics".

528 A. The impulse to steal admits of many degrees which lead on one to another. The removal of the impulse by hypnotic suggestion cannot therefore be fully illustrated by quoting one case only. In degenerate children the impulse may result in action with all the automatism of an unconscious mechanism. When such children are questioned as to the motives which led them to commit the theft, they answer: "I don't know; I couldn't help it." Hypnotic suggestion, by strengthening the power of inhibition, and by bringing into full consciousness the impulse and the movements which have partially sunk below the threshold, may eradicate the bad habit. For illustrations see Bérillon, Revue de l'Hypnotisme, September 1890, p. 75, and February 1896, p. 237; Regis, the same, May 1896; also the case of Krafft-Ebing's patient, lima S., described in his Experimental Study in Hypnotism, translated by Dr. C. G. Chattock (New York), 1889.

Cognate with the kleptomaniacal impulse of the degenerate, but widely different from each other, are two further forms of the impulse to steal which have been successfully combated by hypnotic suggestion. The one is the impulse to steal which is found in "moral idiots." (See cases reported by De Jong, Revue de l'Hypnotisme, September 1891, p. 82, and Auguste Voisin, Revue de l'Hypnotisme, November 1888, p. 130.) The disturbance of character is even more profound than in the cases first mentioned, for the automatic nature of the impulse has become so far exaggerated that round it crystallises a partially or wholly independent chain of memory. The development of the disease is complete when the patient's original personality has become split up into two, which alternate; the one which steals, the other which knows nothing of the thefts. To this type belongs a case observed by Pierre Janet, and described in Neuroses et Idées Fixes, vol. ii. p. 197 foil.: - "Le vol a lieu dans une espèce d'état second avec amnésie. II semble que l'idée du vol, é'veillée par la vue d'un objet quelconque, produise une émotion, un choc qui annihile le reste de la conscience, et que cette idée se développe seule dans une conscience rétrécie".

528 B. Another distressing but somewhat grotesque case in Professor Janet's Névroses et Idées Fixes was that of a kleptomaniac who stole from everybody, but especially from himself. Worse than the somnambulic hero of an old Ingoldsby Legend, who buried a fresh pair of his own trousers every night in the garden, this boy could keep nothing by night or day from his own marauding hands. He stole from himself when he was asleep, but he stole from other people when they, at any rate, were wide awake, and saw perfectly what he was doing. In fact, the psychological interest of this case lies in the poor fellow's own condition at the moment of his thefts, - which was a kind of semi-hypnotisation by involuntary self-suggestion, closely resembling the half-hypnotised state into which an awakened subject falls when the time comes for him to execute some post-hypnotic suggestion. This unwilling kleptomaniac seemed to be subject to a permanent self-suggestion to carry off any object which he particularly noticed; and his own gaze at a silver spoon would throw him into a dreamy condition in which he inevitably put that spoon in his pocket.

Another melancholy aberration, which is not without its comic element, is described by Janet under the heading of "Dipsomania of café au lait, complicated with kleptomania of petits pains".

Mme Pt., a nervous personage, suffered from a dyspepsia which her doctor mistakenly attributed to dilatation of the stomach. He limited her to a wineglass of liquid at each meal, and made her live mainly on dry toast. Her husband supported the doctor, but meantime she saw him drinking café au lait and eating rolls with gusto and freedom; - "c'était pour elle le supplice de Tanta/e." One day her patience gave way. When her husband's back was turned, she threw herself upon a roll which he had left on his plate, then rushed to the crémerie, and made herself an excellent cafe au lait. She was none the worse for it; her husband it was who died. After his death the passion for cafe au lait grew on her, so that when her stock of milk was exhausted at night she would tread her room in anguished longing till the criëmeries opened in the morning. Not venturing to drink more than two cups at the same crémerie, she would wander about Paris and drink at various shops twenty or thirty cups per day.

All these cups she duly and promptly paid for. But a morbid aggravation came. She wanted rolls with her coffee; but now that there was no one to forbid her the rolls, they lost their savour, - the savour of petit pain défendu. A way of supplying this savour occurred to her; - she stole the rolls. She would go to a shop and pay for one roll, - and adroitly make several others fall into a Gampish umbrella. Having collected a dozen or so, she would go home to eat them, and start again.

Now, this poor woman - this coffee-megalomaniac, as an erudite friend of Professor Janet's has termed her - becomes not infrequently very uncomfortable inside. She detests her own obsession, her idée fixe, but she cannot cure herself; nor had Professor Janet, at the time of writing, succeeded in curing her.