6.5 Tantalum, Case 1A 28 year old man has come because of mental and emotional problems. He feels very unsure of himself and he is afraid of people. He thinks that people are looking at him all the time. He feels inferior and can’t make decisions. He prefers to stay at home. In his dreams he has many confrontations with other people. When he feels nervous his diaphragm starts to contract. It happens in a spot exactly between the xyphoid and the navel. The pain is worse from taking a deep breath and sometimes it makes him feel sick. His anxiety is also expressed in other physical symptoms. He has a nystagmus that is very severe, he never looked straight at you. His speech is halting. He had a severe attack of hiccoughs once or twice that he could hardly stop. He also smiles constantly, as if he wants to please you. His sense of smell is diminished and he gets a sore throat in strong, dry winds. He gets frequent headaches right between his eyes, < heat and sunlight. His neck and shoulders are usually quite stiff, and he gets an itch on his lower legs. Also a nagging pain in the region of his kidneys, as if his kidneys are being squeezed out. Occasional pain in the testes. His parents were divorced because they were always fighting. They were incompatible and there was a horrible atmosphere at home. After the divorce his mother always spoke bad about the father. During his secondary school years he went to live with his father, but when his father got a new girl friend they told him to leave.
He feels very vulnerable, as described above. It is a sense of apathy, as if everything is grey and flat, he can’t really feel things. He has become far too serious, lost his sense of humour. He is also very sensitive, especially with regard to appreciation from others. He used to be criticised for his ideas. People also find his behaviour and his nystagmus off putting. He is an individualist and likes to pursue his own ideas. He can get too obsessive about it, he wants things done fast. He can get very annoyed by his friends who want to push him into a direction he doesn’t want to go. He is afraid of getting stuck and not finding his way back again. He loves games, but only for the sake of playing. He hates it when it gets too serious. He once had a relationship but split up after a while. Now he is afraid of committing himself because he thinks he will lose his freedom to speak for himself. His father always forced him to study hard, ‘otherwise you’ll get nowhere in this big, hostile world’. He is good at learning, he studied law and English language, but did not finish it, he couldn’t absorb any more information in the end. Now he does administrative work on a free lance basis.
GeneralsWeather: cold, cold hands and feet, < heat and sunlight; < dry, strong wind; -> sea.
Perspiration: profuse, forehead and back.
Time: < 3 pm.
Desires: spices, biter; he is a vegetarian.
Aversion: sour, sauerkraut, sprouts, meat, fish, egg, milk.
Sleep: tense, on side.
AnalysisAfter
Magnesium phosphoricum he improved considerably, emotionally as well as physically with respect to his nystagmus. But after a year there was no further improvement, not even with higher potencies. Other remedies such as
Cadmium phosphoricum and
Barium sulphuricum did nothing. An analysis based on nystagmus, using Reference works, gave a whole range of remedies, far more than mentioned in the repertory, but none of these worked either. But I still felt that the nystagmus represented the core of his problem. It was so obvious and so severe that you couldn’t deny it. Eventually I decided to translate the nystagmus into a ‘stuttering with the eyes’, an uncontrolled, ‘stammering’ movement of the eyes. Stammering is a symptom of
Niobium, and of the 5th stage in general, with its theme of hesitation and doubt. The eyes however are more involved in the
Gold series and so I go to
Tantalum. The pain in the testes is also typical of the
Gold series.
ReactionAfter
Tantalum 1M suddenly all sort of things started to happen. He realised that he never manifested his abilities, never put his ideas into practice. He noticed he was caught up an a sort of bubble that he couldn’t get out of. Every time he tried to reach the end to break out, the wall would recede and he couldn’t get through. The likeness to the story of Tantalus is most striking! He had a dream in which he was a king (
Gold series) who got poisoned (
Gold series). His own people had betrayed him, because he was standing in the way of a revolutionary new era. The poison had turned his teeth green. He received treatment from some spiritual healers (
Gold series) who stuck needles in his gums. After a while he began to feel stronger and more sure of himself. The world is no longer threatening. He is being asked to treat other people and he now feels he is being asked to make a choice (moving towards
Stage 6, challenge).
The tension and the energy in his eyes is easing up. The nystagmus is getting less and after one year it is only a third of what it used to be. His vision used to be weak, chaotic, foggy and did not reach further than about 3 metres. Now it has become much stronger.