The Seba library treats Syphilis in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Sacks, Oliver, Jung, Carl Gustav, Freud, Sigmund).
Cupid’s Disease A bright woman of ninety, Natasha K., recently came to our clinic. Soon after her eighty-eighth birthday, she said, she noticed ‘a change’. What sort of change? we queried. ‘Delightful!’ she exclaimed.
Sacks introduces late neurosyphilis (‘Cupid’s Disease’) as a case in which organic brain infection paradoxically restores erotic vitality in extreme old age, complicating simple pathological framing.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985thesis
syphilis, 6
Jung’s index entry places syphilis as a bare somatic reference within a cultural-psychological text, indicating its presence as a background medical fact rather than a developed psychological concept.
, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966aside
Syphilis (see Venereal disease)
Freud’s index entry subsumes syphilis under the broader category of venereal disease, treating it as a factor in developmental interference with the sexual instinct rather than an independent analytic object.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905aside
It seems that fewer schizophrenics suffer from venereal disease than mentally healthy individuals.
Bleuler uses the relative absence of venereal disease among schizophrenics as differential-diagnostic evidence, implicitly invoking syphilis to delimit schizophrenia from syphilitic psychosis.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
Syphilis, 211m
A bare index notation in Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary places syphilis alongside terrorism of suffering, indicating its marginal but acknowledged presence in the clinical context of extreme suffering and bodily damage.
, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, 1932aside