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views with her, I ascertained that the cause of the trouble was that
the child was being terrorized by a girl of 8 in the flat below with
whom she used to play.
It appeared that this took the form of dinning into this small
mind that if the mother went out "the bogies would take her away,"
and this unfortunate little person had become so obsessed with this
that on any attempt of the mother to go out shopping or anything of
that sort without her, or if she left her asleep and had managed to
slip out and the child awakened before she got back, the child
screamed in such a manner that the neighbours used to say she
must knock the child about or she wouldn't scream so. After three
therapeutic interviews it was arranged that the mother should go
out alone to the pictures on the Saturday. This was successfully
accomplished and the child cried—according to the mother's story
—not because the mother had gone out but to come down to see me on
the following Monday to tell me that not only had the mother gone
to the pictures on Saturday, but that she had "let her go out to see
Grannie on the Sunday." This little person was quite alright as soon
as the cause was discovered and peace of mind established, and commenced
to put on weight steadily. She is now perfectly alright
and has never had any recurrence of nervous manifestations whatever.
Another interesting case was a child much about the same
age—3 A years who was brought to me with a diurnal incontinence
for a period of about three weeks. The history was that she had
commenced to wet herself during the day; had never wet herself at
night, and had been—before she was brought to me—taken to a
private practitioner who treated her as a case of ordinary incontinence.
It was obvious that this was something out of the ordinary,
as cases of diurnal incontinence are, as a rule the later and
worse stage of a case which has commenced as nocturnal incontinence
only.
On attempting to get the history, it was pointed out to the
mother that there must be some mental conflict, of which no
evidence was obtained for some time, but after continued pressing,