Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
The fluctuation of intensity on the part of the hysterical symptom
recurs as often as one of its new and pathogenic reminiscences is
attacked; the symptom remains, as it were, all the time the order of the
day. If it is necessary to drop for awhile the thread upon which this
symptom hangs, the symptom, too, merges into obscurity in order to
emerge again at a later period of the analysis. This play continues
until, through the completion of the pathogenic material, there occurs a
definite adjustment of this symptom.
Strictly speaking the hysterical symptom does not behave here
differently than a memory picture or a reproduced thought which is
evoked by the pressure of the hand. Here, as there, the adjustment
necessitates the same obsessing obstinacy of recurrence in the memory of
the patient. The difference lies only in the apparent spontaneous
appearance of the hysterical symptom, whereas one readily recalls having
himself provoked the scenes and ideas. But in reality the memory symbols
run in an uninterrupted series from the unchanged memory remnants of
affectful experiences and thinking-acts to the hysterical symptoms.
The phenomenon of “joining in the discussion” of the hysterical symptom
during the analysis carries with it a practical inconvenience to which
the patient should be reconciled. It is quite impossible to undertake
the analysis of a symptom in one stretch or to divide the pauses in the
work in such a manner as to precisely coincide with the resting point in
the adjustment. Furthermore, the interruption which is categorically
dictated by the accessory circumstances of the treatment, like the late
hour, etc., often occurs in the most awkward locations, just when some
critical point could be approached or when a new theme comes to light.
These are the same inconveniences which every newspaper reader
experiences in reading the daily fragments of his newspaper romance,
when, immediately after the decisive speech of the heroine, or after the
report of a shot, etc., he reads, “To be continued.” In our case the
raked-up but unabolished theme, the at first strengthened but not yet
explained symptom, remains in the patient’s psyche, and troubles him
perhaps more than before.
But the patient must understand this as it cannot be differently
arranged. Indeed, there are patients who during such an analysis are
unable to get rid of the theme once touched; they are obsessed by it
even during the interval between the two treatments, and as they are
unable to advance alone with the adjustment, they suffer more than
before. Such patients, too, finally learn to wait for the doctor,
postponing all interest which they have in the adjustment of the
pathogenic material for the hours of the treatment, and they then begin
to feel freer during the intervals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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