[The glass woman]

The author recounts the case of history of a woman patient seeking psychoanalytic treatment for a variety of extremely severe symptoms. In the course of treatment the original symptom constellation changed, revealing new facets but never disappearing completely. Discussing the compulsive, phobic symptomatology of the patient in terms of the traumatic sexual conflicts underlying them and the attendant break with outward reality and psychotic fabrication of a world of the patient's own making, Zeul warns against premature nosological classification. She contends that, in a case like the present one, the diagnosis of the disturbance into a neat set of nosological compartments--borderline/hysteria/psychosis etc.--makes little sense and should be supplanted by an attempt to describe the psychic mechanisms of mental illness.