Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
To the first group we add those cases in which the patient has not
reacted to psychic traumas because the nature of the trauma precluded a
reaction as in the case of an irremediable loss of a beloved person or
because social relations made the reaction impossible, or because it
concerned things which the patient wished to forget and which he
therefore intentionally inhibited and repressed from his conscious
memory. It is just those painful things which in the hypnotic state are
found to be the basis of hysterical phenomena (hysterical delirium of
saints, nuns, abstinent women, and well-bred children).
The second series of determinants is not conditioned by the content of
the memories but by the psychic states with which the corresponding
experiences in the patient have united. As a cause of hysterical
symptoms one really finds in hypnosis presentations which are
insignificant in themselves but which owe their preservation to the fact
that they originated during a severe paralyzing affect like fright or
directly in abnormal psychic conditions, as in the semi-hypnotic dreamy
states of reveries, in autohypnosis and similar states. Here it is the
nature of these conditions which make a reaction to the incident
impossible.
To be sure both determinants may unite, and as a matter of fact they
often do. This is the case when a trauma in itself effective occurs in a
state of a powerful paralyzing affect or in a transformed consciousness.
But due to the psychic trauma it may also happen that in many persons
one of these abnormal states occurs which in turn makes a reaction
impossible.
What is common to both groups of determinants is the fact that those
psychic traumas which are not rectified by reaction are also prevented
from adjustment by associative elaboration. In the first group it is due
to the resolution of the patient who wishes to forget the painful
experiences and in this way, if possible, to exclude them from
association, and in the second group the associative elaboration does
not succeed because there is no productive associative relationship
between the normal and pathological state of consciousness in which
these presentations originated. We shall soon have occasion to discuss
more fully these relationships.
Hence we can say, _that the reason why the pathogenically formed
presentations retain their freshness and affective force is because they
are not subject to the normal waste through ab-reaction and reproduction
in conditions of uninhibited association_.
III.
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