Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/182

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PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES.

derstand, and which contradicted her expectations. The occurrence of important unconscious ideas was therefore also demonstrated in a case of paranoia, and I could hope to reconduct the compulsion of paranoia to repression. It was only peculiar that the assertions which originated in the unconscious were usually heard inwardly or hallucinated by her as her voices.

Concerning the origin of the visual hallucinations, or at least the vivid pictures, I discovered the following: The picture of the female lap occurred almost always together with the organic sensation in the lap. The latter, however, was more constant and often occurred without the picture.

The first pictures of feminine laps appeared in the hydro-therapeutic institute a few hours after she had actually seen a number of women naked in the bath house. They were therefore only simple reproductions of a real impression. It may be assumed that these impressions repeated themselves because something of great interest was connected with them. She stated that she was at that time ashamed of these women, and that since she recalled it she is ashamed of having been seen naked. Having been obliged to look upon this shame as something compulsive, I concluded that according to the mechanism of defense an experience must have here been repressed in which she was not ashamed, and I requested her to allow those reminiscences to emerge which belonged to the theme of shame. She promptly reproduced a series of scenes from her seventeenth to her eighth year, during which while bathing before her mother, her sister, and her physician she was ashamed of her nakedness. This series, however, reached back to a scene in her sixth year when she undressed in the children's room before going to sleep without feeling ashamed of her brother who was present. On questioning her it was found that there were a number of such scenes, and that for years the brothers and sisters were in the habit of showing themselves naked to one another before retiring. I now understood the significance of the sudden thought of being watched on going to sleep. It was an unchanged fragment of the old reproachful reminiscence and she was now trying to make up in shame what she lost as a child.

The supposition that we dealt here with an amour of childhood so frequent in the etiology of hysteria was strengthened by the