Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
On another occasion I had to deal with a young happily married woman,
who as early as in the first years of her girlhood, was found every
morning for some time in a state of lethargy, with rigid members, opened
mouth, and protruding tongue. Similar attacks, though not so marked,
recurred at the present time on awakening. A deep hypnosis could not be
produced, so that I began my investigation in a state of concentration,
and assured her during the first pressure that she would see something
that would be directly connected with the cause of her condition during
her childhood. She acted calmly and willingly, she again saw the
residence in which she had passed her early girlhood, her room, the
position of her bed, the grandmother who lived with them at the time,
and one of her governesses whom she dearly loved. There was then a
succession of small, quite indifferent scenes, in these rooms, and among
these persons, the conclusion of which was the leave taking of the
governess who married from the home. I did not know what to start with
these reminiscences; I could not bring about any connection between them
and the etiology of the attacks. To be sure the various circumstances
were recognized as having occurred at the same time at which the attacks
first appeared.
Before I could continue the analysis, I had occasion to talk to a
colleague, who, in former years, was my patient’s family physician. From
him I obtained the following explanation: At the time that he treated
the mature and physically very well developed girl for these first
attacks, he was struck by the excessive affection in the relations
between her and her governess. He became suspicious and caused the
grandmother to watch these relations. After a short while the old lady
informed him that the governess was wont to pay nightly visits to the
child’s bed, and that quite regularly after such visits the child was
found in the morning in an attack. She did not hesitate to bring about
the quiet removal of this corruptress of youth. The children, as well as
the mother, were made to believe that the governess left the house in
order to get married.
The treatment, which was above all successful, consisted in informing
the young woman of the explanations given to me.
Occasionally the explanations, which one obtains by the pressure
procedure, follow in very remarkable form, and under circumstances which
make the assumption of an unconscious intelligence appear even more
alluring. Thus I recall a lady who suffered for years from obsessions
and phobias, and who referred the origin of her trouble to her
childhood, but could mention nothing to which it could have been
attributed. She was frank and intelligent, and evinced only a very
slight conscious resistance. I will add here that the psychic mechanism
of obsessions is very closely related to that of hysterical symptoms,
and that the technique of the analysis in both is the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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