Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
She heard the voices for the first time under the following
circumstances. With great tension she read the pretty story, “The
Heiterethei” by O. Ludwig, and noticed that while reading she was
preoccupied with incoming thoughts. Immediately after she took a walk on
the highway and suddenly while passing a peasant’s cottage the voices
told her, “That is how the house of the Heiterethei looked! Here is the
well, and here is the bush! How happy she was in all her poverty!” The
voices then repeated whole paragraphs of what she had just read, but it
remained incomprehensible why house, bush, and well of the Heiterethei,
and just such indifferent and most irrelevant passages of the romance
should have obtruded themselves upon her attention with pathological
strength. The analysis showed that while reading she at the same time
entertained extraneous thoughts, and that she was excited by totally
different passages of the book. Against this material analogy between
the couple of the romance and herself and her husband, the reminiscence
of intimate things of her married life and family secrets, against all
these there arose a repressive resistance because they were connected
with her sexual shyness by very simple and demonstrable streams of
thought, and finally resulted in the awakening of old experiences of
childhood. In consequence of the censorship exercised by the repression
the harmless and idyllic passages connected with the objectionable ones
by contrast and vicinity, became reinforced in consciousness, enabling
them to become audible. For example, the first repressed thought
referred to the slander to which the secluded heroine was subjected by
her neighbors. She readily found in this an analogy to herself. She,
too, lived in a small place, had no intercourse with anybody and
considered herself despised by her neighbors. The suspicion against the
neighbors was founded on the fact that in the beginning of her married
life she was obliged to content herself with a small apartment. The wall
of the bedroom, near which stood the nuptial bed of the young couple,
adjoined the neighbors’ room. With the beginning of her marriage there
awakened in her a great sexual shyness. This was apparently due to an
unconscious awakening of some reminiscences of childhood of having
played husband and wife. She was very careful lest the neighbors might
hear through the adjacent wall either words or noises and this shyness
changed into suspicion against the neighbors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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