Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
these symptoms became worse when she was in society, or even in the
street; she therefore hesitated about going out; she also stated that
she experienced nausea for food, and as a result she became reduced in
vitality.
I obtained this from her when she came under my care in the winter of
1895. I present this case in detail in order to make the impression that
we really deal here with a very frequent form of chronic paranoia, which
diagnosis will agree with the details of the symptoms and their behavior
to be mentioned later. At that time she either concealed from me the
delusions for the interpretation of the hallucinations or they really
had not as yet occurred. Her intelligence was undiminished. It was
reported to me as peculiar that she had a number of rendezvous with her
brother who lived in the neighborhood, in order to confide something to
him, but this she never told him. She never spoke about her
hallucinations, and towards the end she did not say much about the
aggravations and persecutions from which she suffered. What I have to
report about this patient concerns the etiology of the case and the
mechanism of the hallucinations. I discovered the etiology by applying
Breuer’s method exactly as in hysteria, for the investigation and
removal of the hallucinations. I started with the presupposition that
just as in the two other defense neuroses known to me this paranoia must
contain unconscious thoughts and repressed reminiscences which have to
be brought to consciousness, in the same manner as in the others, by
overcoming a certain resistance. The patient immediately corroborated
this expectation by behaving during the analysis exactly like a
hysteric, and under attention to the pressure of my hand she reproduced
thoughts which she could not remember having had, which she at first
could not understand, and which contradicted her expectations. The
occurrence of important unconscious ideas was therefore also
demonstrated in a case of paranoia, and I could hope to reconduct the
compulsion of paranoia to repression. It was only peculiar that the
assertions which originated in the unconscious were usually heard
inwardly or hallucinated by her as her voices.
Concerning the origin of the visual hallucinations, or at least the
vivid pictures, I discovered the following: The picture of the female
lap occurred almost always together with the organic sensation in the
lap. The latter, however, was more constant and often occurred without
the picture.
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