Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
I will now attempt to give a series of examples showing the excellent
achievements of this procedure. I treated a young lady who suffered for
six years from an intolerable and protracted nervous cough, which
apparently was nurtured by every common catarrh, but must have had its
strong psychic motives. Every other remedy had long since shown itself
to be powerless, and I therefore attempted to remove the symptom by
psychoanalysis. All that she could remember was that the nervous cough
began at the age of fourteen while she boarded with her aunt. She
remembered absolutely no psychic excitement during that time, and did
not believe that there was a motive for her suffering. Under the
pressure of my hand, she at first recalled a large dog. She then
recognized the memory picture; it was her aunt’s dog which was attached
to her, and used to accompany her everywhere, and without any further
aid it occurred to her that this dog died and that the children buried
it solemnly; and on the return from this funeral her cough appeared. I
asked her why she began to cough, and after helping her with the
pressure, the following thought occurred to her: “Now I am all alone in
this world; no one loves me here; this animal was my only friend, and
now I have lost it.” She then continued her story. “The cough
disappeared when I left my aunt, but reappeared a year and a half
later.”—“What was the reason for it?”—“I do not know.”—I again exerted
some pressure on the forehead, and she recalled the news of her uncle’s
death during which the cough again manifested itself, and also recalled
a train of thought similar to the former. The uncle was apparently the
only one in the family who sympathized with and loved her. That was,
therefore, the pathogenic idea: “People do not love her; everybody else
is preferred; she really does not deserve to be loved,” etc. To the idea
of love there clung something which caused a marked resistance to the
communication. The analysis was interrupted before this explanation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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