Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
I have made use of such experiences in the therapy of phobias and
obsessions, and despite the patient’s resistances I have redirected the
attention to the repressed sexual ideas, and wherever feasible I have
blocked the sources from which the same originated. To be sure I cannot
maintain that all phobias and obsessions originate in the manner here
revealed; first, my experience, in proportion to the abundance of these
neuroses, embraces only a limited amount, and second, I, myself, know
that these “psychasthenic” symptoms (according to Janet’s designation)
are not all of the same value.[40] Thus, for instance, there are pure
hysterical phobias. But I believe that the mechanism of the
transposition of the affect will be demonstrated in the greater part of
the phobias and obsessions, and I must assert that these neuroses, which
are found just as often isolated as combined with hysteria and
neurasthenia, are not to be thrown together with the ordinary
neurasthenia for which fundamental symptom a psychic mechanism is not
all to be assumed.
III.
In both cases thus far considered the defense of the unbearable idea was
brought about by the separation of the same from its affect; the idea
though weakened and isolated remained in consciousness. There exists,
however, a far more energetic and more successful form of defense
wherein the ego misplaces the unbearable idea with its affect, and
behaves as though the unbearable idea had never approached the ego. But
at the moment when this is brought about the person suffers from a
psychosis which can only be classified as an “hallucinatory confusion.”
A single example will explain this assertion. A young girl gives her
first impulsive love to a man who she firmly believed reciprocated her
love. As a matter of fact she was mistaken; the young man had other
motives for visiting her. It was not long before she was disappointed;
at first she defended herself against it by converting hysterically the
corresponding experience, and thus came to believe that he would come
some day to ask her in marriage; but in consequence of the imperfect
conversion and the constant pressure of new painful impressions, she
felt unhappy and ill. She finally expects him with the greatest tension
on a definite day, it is the day of a family reunion. The day passes but
he does not come. After all the trains on which he could have come have
passed she suddenly merged into an hallucinatory confusion. She thought
that he did come, she heard his voice in the garden, and hastened down
in her night gown to receive him. For two months after she lived in a
happy dream, the content of which was that he was there, that he was
always with her, and that everything was as before (before the time of
the painfully defended disappointment). The hysteria and depression were
thus conquered; during her sickness she never mentioned anything about
the last period of doubt and suffering; she was happy as long as she was
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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