Strange Case Of Man Who Returned To Childhood

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28354, 13 August 1957, Page 13

Strange Case Of Man Who Returned To Childhood

(Rec. 10 p-m.) LONDON, Aug. 12. A 30-year-old married man sat down to breakfast with “The Times” at his side. He asked for a comic. Suddenly and strangely he had become a two-year-old child, according to the “Daily Mail” today. Mr X—his parents are widely known—does not know he was once a grown man. His talk is being recorded on tape, “time machine” and truth drugs are being used. The story of the man who grew down began on a Wednesday morning in suburbia a year ago. Mr X was preparing to catch a train to his office. His umbrella, brief case and bowler were ready. But he refused his breakfast coffee and ignored the newspaper’s imperial and foreign section which he normally turned to first. His wife helped him on with his jacket and he left for his train. An hour later his wife saw the man who grew down playing with the earth between the rose bushes which he had pruned the week-end before. A doctor treating him said yesterday: “The degree of this lean’s complaint is extremely

rare. He has regressed—gone back.”

The doctor added: “All of us go back to some instant in our past, but sometimes —very rarely —a shock occurs which prevents a person from returning from the point he has gone back to. “This is what has happened to this man. He is behaving quite unconsciously like a young child —interested in jig saw puzzles, and scribbling with crayons. He is spoon and bottle-fed. “He talks in—so far as we can establish—the language of his childhood. “When he progresses out of the two or three-year-old state, as he sometimes does, he wants to climb trees and play in a sandpit.” With mescalin (the “time machine” drug) doctors are releasing a brake which prevents Mr X from returning to 30. The doctor said: “Under this influence and that of sodium amytal (truth drug) he is talking quite normally about his life and we are—as it were —taking him apart, stage by stage through his life to find out the root causes of his regression?* Once he is out of the drug he is a child again. All the records are being examined by a team of psychiatrists and doctors under the direction of a leading British psychiatrist.