Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow.

  • Joseph Jastrow
Date:
1948,
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Freud : his dream and sex theories / by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Anna’s story was this: She had been in attendance at the bedside of her father in a long illness which proved fatal. She had fallen asleep with her arm hanging over the back of the chair; when she awoke, startled, the arm had become numb; she could not feel it or move it. The momentary incapacity was ac¬ cepted as real. YVhat a constricted circulation started was fixed by her emotional agitation; such is the hysterical mechanism, converting a psychic idea into a bodily symptom. Believing herself paralyzed, she was paralyzed. Next, the tears in her eyes prevented her from seeing clearly the face of her watch when her father asked for the time; her vision, blurred first by tears, later continued so by fears. Her fatigue longed for relief; she was impelled by a sense of duty to keep on. The numbness and blurred vision were not accepted for what they were, as they would have been under normal conditions, but became hysteri¬ cally fixed afflictions, the plot thickening as the se¬ quence of hysterical impairments developed. Breuer and Freud were well aware that these issues closely paralleled those produced by hypnotic sugges¬ tions; they were in a sense products of self-suggestion, which persisted because the agitation which imposed them continued, and there was no force to nullify them. They might be likewise—this a later “discovery”—not merely recent wounds but the flaring up of older in¬ juries, dating from disturbed childhood experiences or deeply emotionalized relations. The neurotic constitu¬ tion was such because it was susceptible to such shock. Breuer’s part in the “discovery” was not alone in sug¬ gesting this peculiar psychic origin and mechanism of bodily symptoms, but also in developing the technique of relief of “psychogenic” maladies by the “talking
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