A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
I said last time that we would not continue our work from the standpoint
of our doubts, but on the basis of our results. We have not even touched
upon two of the most interesting conclusions, derived equally from the
same two sample analyses.
In the first place, both patients give us the impression of being
_fixated_ upon some very definite part of their past; they are unable to
free themselves therefrom, and have therefore come to be completely
estranged both from the present and the future. They are now isolated in
their ailment, just as in earlier days people withdrew into monasteries
there to carry along the burden of their unhappy fates. In the case of
the first patient, it is her marriage with her husband, really
abandoned, that has determined her lot. By means of her symptoms she
continues to deal with her husband; we have learned to understand those
voices which plead his case, which excuse him, exalt him, lament his
loss. Although she is young and might be coveted by other men, she has
seized upon all manner of real and imaginary (magic) precautions to
safeguard her virtue for him. She will not appear before strangers, she
neglects her personal appearance; furthermore, she cannot bring herself
to get up readily from any chair on which she has been seated. She
refuses to give her signature, and finally, since she is motivated by
her desire not to let anyone have anything of hers, she is unable to
give presents.
In the case of the second patient, the young girl, it is an erotic
attachment for her father that had established itself in the years prior
to puberty, which plays the same role in her life. She also has arrived
at the conclusion that she may not marry so long as she is sick. We may
suspect she became ill in order that she need not marry, and that she
might stay with her father.
It is impossible to evade the question of how, in what manner, and
driven by what motives, an individual may come by such a remarkable and
unprofitable attitude toward life. Granted of course that this bearing
is a general characteristic of neurosis, and not a special peculiarity
of these two cases, it is nevertheless a general trait in every neurosis
of very great importance in practice. Breuer's first hysterical patient
was fixated in the same manner upon the time when she nursed her very
sick father. In spite of her recuperation she has, in certain respects,
since that time, been done with life; although she remained healthy and
able, she did not enter on the normal life of women. In every one of our
patients we may see, by the use of analysis, that in his
disease-symptoms and their results he has gone back again into a
definite period of his past. In the majority of cases he even chooses a
very early phase of his life, sometime a childhood phase, indeed,
laughable as it may appear, a phase of his very suckling existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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