Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
If the results of the two psychic operations disagree, the
contradiction between the two may never be brought to logical
adjustment, but as a compromise between the resistance and the
pathological result of thought an apparently absurd obsession enters
into consciousness beside the normal result of the thought. If both
streams of thought yield the same result, they reinforce each other so
that the normally gained result of thought now behaves psychically like
an obsession. Wherever neurotic compulsion manifests itself psychically
it originates from repression. The obsessions have, as it were, a
psychical course of compulsion which is due, not to their own validity,
but to the source from which they originate, or to the source which
furnishes a part of their validity.
A second form of compulsion neurosis results if the repressed reproach
and not the repressed content of memory forces a replacement in the
conscious psychic life. Through a psychic admixture, the affect of the
reproach can change itself into any other affect of displeasure, and if
this occurs there is nothing to hinder the substituting affect from
becoming conscious. Thus, the reproach (of having performed in childhood
some sexual actions) may be easily transformed into shame (if some one
else becomes aware of it), into hypochondriacal anxiety (because of the
physical harmful consequences of those reproachful acts), into social
anxiety (fearing punishment from others), into religious anxiety, into
delusions of observation (fear of betraying those actions to others),
into fear of temptations (justified distrust in one’s own moral ability
of resistance), etc. Besides, the memory content of the reproachful
action may also be represented in consciousness, or it may be altogether
concealed, which makes the diagnosis very difficult. Many cases which on
superficial examination are taken as ordinary (neurasthenic)
hypochondria often belong to this group of compulsive affects; the very
frequently so called “periodic neurasthenia” or “periodic melancholia”
especially seem to be explained by compulsive affects or obsessions, a
recognition not unimportant therapeutically.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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