Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
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Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
The condition is usually not so simple as one represents it in special
cases, as, for example, in a single case in which a symptom originates
through a serious trauma. We frequently deal not with a single
hysterical symptom but with a number of the same which are partially
independent of one another and partially connected. We must not expect a
single traumatic reminiscence whose nucleus is a single pathogenic idea,
but we must be ready to assume a series of partial traumas and a
concatenation of pathogenic streams of thought. The monosymptomatic
traumatic hysteria is, as it were, an elementary organism, it is a
single being in comparison to the complicated structure of a grave
hysterical neurosis as is generally encountered.
The psychic material of such hysteria presents itself as a
multidimensional formation of at least triple stratification. I hope to
be able to soon justify this figurative expression. First of all there
is a nucleus of such reminiscences (either experiences or streams of
thought) in which the traumatic moment culminated, or in which the
pathogenic idea has found its purest formation. Around this nucleus we
often find an incredibly rich mass of other memory material which we
have to elaborate by the analysis in the triple arrangement mentioned
before. In the first place, there is an unmistakable linear
chronological arrangement which takes place within every individual
theme. As an example of this I can only cite the arrangements in
Breuer’s analysis of Anna O. The theme is that of becoming deaf, of not
hearing,[34] which then becomes differentiated according to seven
determinants, and under each heading there were from ten to one hundred
single reminiscences in chronological order. It was as if one should
take up an orderly kept record. In the analysis of my patient, Emmy v.
N., there were similar if not so many memory sub-divisions; they formed
quite a general event in every analysis. They always occurred in a
chronological order which was as definitely reliable as the serial
sequences of the days of the week or the names of the months in
psychically normal individuals. They increased the work of the analysis
through the peculiarity of reversing the series of their origin in the
reproduction; the freshest and the most recent occurrence of the
accumulation occurred first as a “wrapper,” and that with which the
series really began gave the impression of the conclusion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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