Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
(_b_) Fear in men with frustrated excitement (during the engagement
period), persons who out of fear for the consequences of sexual
relations satisfy themselves with handling or looking at the woman. This
group of determinants which can moreover be transferred to the other
sex—engagement periods, relations with sexual forbearance—furnish the
purest cases of the neurosis.
(_c_) Fear in men who practice coitus interruptus. As observed above,
coitus interruptus injures the woman if it is practiced regardless of
the woman’s gratification; it becomes injurious to the man, if in order
to bring about the gratification in the woman be voluntarily controls
the coitus by delaying the ejaculation. In this manner we can understand
why it is that in couples who practice coitus interruptus it is usually
only one of them who becomes afflicted. Moreover the coitus interruptus
only rarely produces in man a pure anxiety neurosis, usually it is a
mixture of the same with neurasthenia.
(_d_) Fear in men in the senium. There are men who show a climacterium
like women, and merge into an anxiety neurosis at the time when their
potency diminishes and their libido increases.
Finally I must add two more cases holding true for both sexes:
(_e_) Neurasthenics merge into anxiety neurosis in consequence of
masturbation as soon as they refrain from this manner of sexual
gratification. These persons have especially made themselves unfit to
bear abstinence.
What is important for the understanding of the anxiety neurosis is the
fact that any noteworthy development of the same occurs only in men who
remain potent, and in non-anesthetic women. In neurasthenics, who on
account of masturbation have markedly injured their potency, anxiety
neurosis as a result of abstinence occurs but rarely and limits itself
usually to hypochondria and light chronic dizziness. The majority of
women are really to be considered as “potent”; a real impotent, that is,
a real anesthetic woman, is also inaccessible to anxiety neurosis, and
bears strikingly well the injuries cited.
How far we are perhaps justified in assuming constant relations between
individual etiological moments and individual symptoms from the complex
of anxiety neurosis, I do not care to discuss here.
(_f_) The last of the etiological determinants to be mentioned seems, in
the first place, really not to be of a sexual nature. Anxiety neurosis
originates in both sexes through the moment of overwork, exhaustive
exertion, as for instance, after sleepless nights, nursing the sick, and
even after serious illnesses.
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