the heart of such a mystery it was necessary to accumulate further material. And the greater our experience the clearer does it become that in all cases with such traumatic experiences analysed up to the present, there co-exists a special kind of disturbance which can only be described as a derangement in the sphere of love. Not all of us give due credit to the anomalous nature of love, reaching high as heaven, sinking low as hell, uniting in itself all extremes of good and evil, of lofty and low.[1]
As soon as Freud recognised this, a decisive change came about in his view. In his earlier researches, whilst more or less dominated by Charcot’s trauma-theory, he had sought for the origin of the neurosis in actual traumatic experiences; but now the centre of gravity shifted to a very different point. This is best demonstrated by reference to our case; we can understand that horses might easily play a significant part in the patient’s life, but it is not clear why there should be this later reaction, so exaggerated, so uncalled for. It is not her fear of horses which forms the morbid factor in this curious story; to get at the real truth we must remember our empirical conclusion, that, side by side with traumatic experiences, there is also invariably present some disturbance in the sphere of love. We must now go on to inquire whether perhaps there is anything unsatisfactory in this respect in the case under review.
Our patient has a young man friend, to whom she is thinking of becoming engaged, she loves him and expects to be happy with him. At first nothing more is discoverable; but the investigator must not let himself be deterred by a negative result in the beginning of this preliminary questioning. When the direct way does not lead to the desired end, an indirect way may be taken. We accordingly turn our attention back to that strange moment when she ran away in front of the horses. We inquire who were her companions
- ↑ We may still apply to love the saying: “The heaven above, the heaven below, The sky above, the sky below, All things above, all things below, Succeed and prosper” (Old Mystic). Mephistopheles expresses the idea when he describes himself as “Part of that power which still produceth good, whilst ever scheming ill.”
