Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
With the discovery of the motive for the first conversion we began a
second more fruitful period of the treatment. In the first place very
soon afterward the patient surprised me with the statement that she now
knew why the pains always radiated from that definite location on the
right thigh and were most painful there. This is really the place upon
which her father’s leg rested every morning while she changed the
bandages of his badly swollen leg. That occurred hundreds of times, and
strange to say she did not think of this connection until today. She
thus gave me the desired explanation of the origin of an atypical
hysterogenic zone. Furthermore during our analysis her painful legs
always commenced to “join in the discussion.” I mean the following
remarkable state of affairs: The patient was as a rule free from pain
when we began our work, but as soon as I evoked some recollection by
question or by pressure of the head she at first reported some pain
usually of a very vivid nature, and then winced and placed her hand on
the painful area. This awakened pain remained constant as long as the
patient was controlled by the recollection, reaching its height when she
was about to utter the essential and critical part of her communication,
and disappearing with the last words of the statement. I gradually
learned to use this awakened pain as a compass. Whenever she was moody
or claimed to have pains I knew that she had not told me everything, and
urged a continuation of the confession until the pain was “spoken away.”
Then only did I awaken a new recollection.
During this period of ab-reaction, the patient’s condition showed such a
striking improvement both somatically and psychically that I used to
remark half jokingly that during each treatment I carried away a certain
number of pain motives, and that when I had cleaned them all out she
would be well. She soon reached a stage during which she had no pain
much of the time; she consented to walk a great deal and to give up her
hitherto condition of isolation. During the analysis I followed up now
the spontaneous fluctuations of her condition and now some fragments of
her sorrowful tale which in my opinion I had not sufficiently exhausted.
In this work I made some interesting discoveries the principles of which
I could later verify in other patients.
In the first place it was found that the spontaneous fluctuations never
occurred unless provoked associatively by the events of the day. On one
occasion she heard of an illness in the circle of her acquaintances
which recalled to her a detail in the illness of her father. On another
occasion the child of her deceased sister visited her and its
resemblance to its mother recalled many painful incidents. On still
another occasion it was a letter from her absent sister showing
distinctly the influence of the inconsiderate brother-in-law, and this
awakened a pain causing the reproduction of a family scene heretofore
not reported.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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