Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/184

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170
PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES.

fusing to tell him anything. Her explanation was that she thought that if she only looked at him he must understand her suffering, as he knew the cause of it. As this brother was really the only person who could know anything about the etiology of her disease it followed that she acted from a motive which, though she did not consciously understand, seemed perfectly justified as soon as a new sense was put on it from the unconscious.

I then succeeded in causing her to reproduce different scenes the culminating points of which were the sexual relations with her brother at least from her sixth to her tenth year. During this work of reproduction the organic sensation in the lap "joined in the discussion," precisely as regularly observed in the analysis of memory remnants of hysterical patients. The picture of a naked female lap (but now reduced to childish proportions and without hair) immediately appeared or stayed away in accordance with the occurrence of the scene in question in full light or in darkness. The disgust for eating, too, was explained by a repulsive detail of these actions. After we had gone through this series, the hallucinatory sensations and pictures disappeared without having thus far returned.[1]

I have thus learned that these hallucinations were nothing other than fragments from the content of the repressed experiences of childhood, that is, symptoms of the return of the repressed material.

I now turned to the analysis of the voices. Here it must before all be explained why such indifferent remarks as, "Here goes Mrs. P.—She now looks for apartments, etc.," could be so painfully perceived, and how these harmless sentences managed to become distinguished by hallucinatory enforcement. To begin with, it was clear that these " voices " could not be hallucinatory reproduced reminiscences like the pictures and sensations, but rather thoughts which "became loud."

She heard the voices for the first time under the following circumstances. With great tension she read the pretty story,

  1. When the meagre success of this treatment was later removed by an exacerbation, she did not again see the offensive pictures of strange genitals, but she had the idea that strangers saw her genitals as soon as they were behind her.