Page 199 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

160 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

two pieces and then into several. Soon there were only two pieces, and
then they disappeared. There were frequent throat and eye tics while she
was talking.
A succession of such sessions will bring about the sedation of the motor
disturbance.

Here are notes on another session:
I told her to bring back the circles. She could not see them at fi rst; then they
came. They were broken. She entered them. They broke, rose again, then
gently, one after another, fell away into the void. I told her to listen to the
tom-tom. She did not hear it. She called to it. She heard it on the left.
I suggested to her that an angel would go with her to the tom-tom:
She wanted to go all alone. But someone was coming down from the sky.
It was an angel. He was smiling; he took her close to the tom-tom. There
were only black men there, and they were dancing round a large fi re and
looked evil. The angel asked her what they were going to do; she said they
were going to burn a white man. She looked for him everywhere. She could
not see him.
“Ah, I see him! He’s a white man about fifty years old. He’s half
undressed.”
The angel began to negotiate with the black chief (for she was afraid).
The black chief said that this white man was not from their country and so
they were going to burn him. But he had done nothing wrong.
They set him free and went back to their dancing, joyfully. She refused
to take part in the dance.
I sent her to talk to the chief. He was dancing alone. The white man had
disappeared. She wanted to go away and seemed to have no desire to know
the Negroes. She wanted to go away with her angel, somewhere where she
would really be at home, with her mother, her brothers, and her sisters.

When the tics had ceased, the treatment was dropped. A few
days later the patient was seen again because she had had a
relapse. These are the notes of that session:

The circles kept coming closer. She hit them with a stick. They broke into
fragments. The stick was a magic wand. It changed these bits of iron into
something shining and beautiful.

4/7/08 14:16:55
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