Another patient, a boy in his early adolescence, was brought for treatment on account of convulsive seizures that had appeared sometime after his widowed mother remarried. Jake got the impression that the patient was suffering from a functional --emotionally related-- convulsive disorder. A sad picture emerged of a yearning for an indifferent stepfather's attention, this unrequited love fighting violent jealousy and deep hatred toward him for having usurped the deceased father's place. Jake had read that psychically determined convulsions may reflect the unconscious liberation of repressed hostility and aggression reaching murderous proportions. The patient was easily hypnotized.

"When was the last time you had a convulsive attack?"
"Yesterday morning."
"What were you doing?"
"I was chopping wood with an ax."
"Now you are back at that moment...Start telling me what is happening."
"I'm chopping wood...My stepfather walks by...I am overcome by a strong rage...I want to hurt him..."
After a few seconds, the patient adds, "I fall to the ground."
"While you are on the ground you are having a dream. Tell me what you see."
"I split my stepfather's skull with the ax."

Very gingerly --using hypnosis at first and thereafter in the waking state-- Jake succeeded in bringing to the boy's understanding the terrible ambivalent feelings toward his stepfather and the way he was escaping from this aggressive drive by creating a convulsive state in which he liberated his rage without feeling the terrible anxiety of guilt. The convulsions ceased.

Now, the point is, this patient brought to Jake's mind the image of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov using an ax as a macabre and --most important-- unusually cumbersome, primitive killing weapon. Jake felt that there might be a connection and meant to look up if the Russian writer had also suffered from convulsions. He let the matter stay until his interest reawakened some thirty years later. It happened when he read a book on anthropology about a strong suggestion that at a certain stage of evolution, man's ancestor had suddenly become carnivorous and had acquired the capacity to kill by means of a weapon. The alleged instrument was the antelope's femur, and the killing was effected by bashing the victim's skull.