Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
I will now introduce another example which will illustrate the efficacy
of symbolization under other determinants. On one occasion Mrs. Cäcilie
M. was tormented by a violent pain in her right heel, experiencing
stinging sensations which made walking impossible. The analysis
conducted us to a time when the patient was in a foreign institution.
For eight days she lay in her room, and for the first time the house
physician was to take her to the dining room. The pain came on while the
patient took the physician’s arm on leaving the room. It disappeared
during the reproduction of this scene while she remarked that at that
time she feared lest she would not make the “proper impression” on this
strange society[25] (“rechte Auftreten”).
This seems a striking, almost comical example for the origin of
hysterical symptoms through symbolization by means of an expression of
speech. But a closer investigation of the circumstances of that moment
will favor another conception. The patient at that time suffered from
pain in her feet on account of which she remained in bed, and we can
only assume that the fear which obsessed her on taking the first steps
produced from the simultaneously existing pains the one symbolically
appropriate symptom in the right heel so as to form it into a psychic
algia and to particularly fit it for long duration.
Notwithstanding the fact that the mechanism of symbolization in these
examples seems to be crowded to second rank, that which certainly
corresponds to the rule, I have still other examples at my disposal
which seem to demonstrate the origin of hysterical symptoms through
symbolization only. One of the best is the following example which again
refers to Mrs. Cäcilie M. At the age of fifteen she once lay in bed
watched by her austere grandmother. The girl suddenly cried out
complaining of having perceived a pain in the forehead between the eyes
which thereafter continued for weeks. On analyzing this pain, which was
reproduced after almost thirty years, she stated that her grandmother
gazed at her so “piercingly” that it seemed as if her look penetrated
deeply into her brain. She was really afraid of being looked upon
suspiciously by this old lady. On reproducing this thought she burst
into loud laughter and the pain ceased. Here I find nothing other than
the mechanism of symbolization which in a way stands midway between the
mechanism of auto-suggestion and that of conversion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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