Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/107

Rh 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 governness 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 governness 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.

On asking the lady whether she had seen or recalled anything under the pressure of my hand, she answered, "Neither, but aword suddenly occurred to me."—"A single word?"—"Yes, but it is too foolish."—"Just tell it."—"Teacher."—"Nothing more?"—"No." I exerted pressure a second time, and again a single word flashed through her mind: "Shirt."—I now observed that we have dealt with a new mode of replying, and by repeated