Kleptomania, Hydrocephalus, and Curative Speech: Individual Cases

And now for the other difficult child of whom I was speaking yesterday, who is not yet quite a year old, the case of hydrocephalus. Treatment has indeed in this instance been very difficult so far. For what do we observe in this child? What strikes us about him? First and foremost, excessive excitability and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system. This it is that has made possible such a prodigious enlargement of the head. Marked irritability of nerves and senses will always be found to express itself in an enlargement of the head. We must however be careful here to look at relative and not absolute measurements. If a person who is predisposed to be small altogether, has a head of the same size as that of a big, tall person, then he has what is for him a large head. This must not be forgotten when we are considering cases that are not abnormal. The child we saw yesterday is abnormal. The inordinate sensitiveness and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system, which are so evident in him, have been induced by the conditions under which he was living in the embryo time; I described these conditions to you yesterday, explaining them as due to the uneven way in which the influences of mother and father co-operated in the embryo.