Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
student who becomes disturbed by an anxiety neurosis while preparing for
his final state examination. I find that here, as there, the effect is
not explained by the reported etiology. One must not necessarily
“overwork” himself studying, and a healthy mother is wont to react to
the death of her child with normal grief. But, above all, I would expect
that the overworked student would acquire a cephalasthenia, and the
mother in our example a hysteria. That both became afflicted with
anxiety neurosis causes me to attach importance to the fact that the
mother lived for eight year in marital coitus interruptus, and that the
student entertained for three years a warm love affair with a
“respectable” girl whom he was not allowed to impregnate.
These examples tend to show that where the specific sexual injury of the
coitus interruptus is in itself unable to provoke an anxiety neurosis it
at least predisposes to its acquisition. The anxiety neurosis then comes
to light as soon as the effect of another banal injury enters into the
latent effect of the specific moment. The former can quantitatively
substitute the specific moment but not supplant it qualitatively. The
specific moment always remains that which determines the form of
neurosis. I hope to be able to prove to a greater extent this
proposition for the etiology of the neurosis.
Furthermore, the last discussions contain the, not in itself, improbable
assumption that a sexual injury like coitus interruptus asserts itself
through summation. The time required before the effect of this summation
becomes visible depends upon the predisposition of the individual and
the former burdening of his nervous system. The individuals who bear
coitus interruptus manifestly without disadvantage really become
predisposed by it to the disturbance—anxiety neurosis—which can at any
time burst forth spontaneously or after a banal, otherwise inadequate,
trauma, just as the chronic alcoholic finally develops a cirrhosis or
another disease by summation, or under the influence of a fever he
merges into a delirium.
III. ADDENDA TO THE THEORY OF ANXIETY NEUROSIS.
The following discussions claim nothing but the value of a first
tentative experiment, which judgment should not influence the acceptance
of the facts mentioned above. The estimation of this “Theory of Anxiety
Neurosis” is rendered still more difficult by the fact that it merely
corresponds to a fragment of a more comprehensive representation of the
neuroses.
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