Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/127

Rh characteristic and instructive fluctuations. The intensity of the same (let us say of a nausea) increases the deeper one penetrates into its pathogenic reminiscence; it reaches its height shortly before the latter has been expressed, and suddenly subsides or disappears completely for a while after it has been fully expressed. If through resistance the patient delays the expression, the tension of the sensation of nausea becomes unbearable, and, if the expression cannot be forced, vomiting actually sets in. One thus gains a plastic impression of the fact that the vomiting takes the place of a psychic action (here that of speaking) just as was asserted in the conversion theory of hysteria.

The fluctuations of intensity on the part of the hysterical symptom recurs as often as one of its new and pathogenic reminiscences is attacked; the symptom remains, as it were, all the time the order of the day. If it is necessary to drop for a while the thread upon which this symptom hangs, the symptom, too, merges into obscurity in order to emerge again at a later period of the analysis. This play continues until, through the completion of the pathogenic material, there occurs a definite adjustment of this symptom.

Strictly speaking the hysterical symptom does not behave here differently than a memory picture or a reproduced thought which is evoked by the pressure of the hand. Here, as there, the adjustment necessitates the same obsessing obstinacy of recurrence in the memory of the patient. The difference lies only in the apparent spontaneous appearance of the hysterical symptom, whereas one readily recalls having himself provoked the scenes and ideas. But in reality the memory symbols run in an uninterrupted series from the unchanged memory remnants of affectful experiences and thinking-acts to the hysterical symptoms.

The phenomenon of "joining in the discussion" of the hysterical symptom during the analysis carries with it a practical inconvenience to which the patient should be reconciled. It is quite impossible to undertake the analysis of a symptom in one stretch or to divide the pauses in the work in such a manner as to precisely coincide with the resting point in the adjustment. Furthermore, the interruption which is categorically dictated by the accessory circumstances of the treatment, like the late hour, etc., often occurs in the most awkward locations, just when some