Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
2. In the anamnesis of many cases of anxiety neurosis we find in both
men and women a striking fluctuation in the intensity of the appearances
in both the coming and going of the whole condition. This year was
almost wholly good, the following was terrible, etc.; on one occasion
the improvement occurred after a definite treatment which, however,
failed to produce a response at the next attack. If we inform ourselves
about the number and the sequence of the children, and compare this
marriage chronicle with the peculiar course of the neurosis, the result
of the simple solution shows that the periods of improvement or well
being corresponded with the pregnancies of the woman during which,
naturally, the occasions for preventive relations were unnecessary. The
treatment which benefited the husband, be it Father Kneip’s or the
hydrotherapeutic institute, was the one which he has taken after he
found his wife was pregnant.
3. From the anamnesis of the patients we often find that the symptoms of
the anxiety neurosis are relieved at a certain time by another neurosis,
perhaps a neurasthenia which has supplanted it. It can then be regularly
demonstrated that shortly before this change of the picture there
occurred a corresponding change in the form of a sexual injury.
Whereas such experiences, which can be augmented at pleasure, plainly
obtrude upon the physician the sexual etiology for a certain category of
cases, other cases which would have otherwise remained incomprehensible
can at least without gainsaying be solved and classified by the key of
the sexual etiology. We refer to those numerous cases in which
everything exists that has been found in the former category, such as
the appearance of anxiety neurosis on the one hand, and the specific
moment of the coitus interruptus on the other, but yet something else
slips in, namely, a long interval between the assumed etiology and its
effect, and perhaps other etiological moments of a non-sexual nature. We
have here, for example, a man who was seized with an attack of
palpitation on hearing of his father’s death, and who since that time
suffered from an anxiety neurosis. The case cannot be understood, for up
to that time this man was not nervous. The death of the father, well
advanced in years, did not occur under any peculiar circumstances, and
it must be admitted that the natural expected death of an aged father
does not belong to those experiences which are wont to make a healthy
adult sick. The etiological analysis will perhaps seem clearer if I add
that out of regard for his wife this man practiced coitus interruptus
for eleven years. At all events the manifestations are precisely the
same as those appearing in other persons after a short sexual injury of
this nature, and without the intervention of another trauma. The same
judgment may be pronounced in the case of a woman who merges into an
anxiety neurosis after the death of her child, or in the case of the
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