Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/128

114 critical point could be approached or when a new theme comes to light. These are the same inconveniences which every newspaper reader experiences in reading the daily fragments of his newspaper romance, when, immediately after the decisive speech of the heroine, or after the report of a shot, etc., he reads, "To be continued." In our case the raked-up but unabolished theme, the at first strengthened but not yet explained symptom, remains in the patient's psyche, and troubles him perhaps more than before.

But the patient must understand this as it cannot be differently arranged. Indeed, there are patients who during such an analysis are unable to get rid of the theme once touched; they are obsessed by it even during the interval between the two treatments, and as they are unable to advance alone with the adjustment, they suffer more than before. Such patients, too, finally learn to wait for the doctor, postponing all interest which they have in the adjustment of the pathogenic material for the hours of the treatment, and they then begin to feel freer during the intervals.

The general condition of the patient during such an analysis seems also worthy of consideration. For a while it remains uninfluenced by the treatment expressing the former effective factors. But then a moment comes in which the patient is seized, and his interest chained and from that time his general condition becomes more and more dependent on the condition of the work. Whenever a new explanation is gained and an important contribution in the chain of the analysis is reached, the patient feels relieved and experiences a presentiment of the approaching deliverance; but at each standstill of the work, at each threatening entanglement, the psychic burden which oppresses him grows, and the unhappy sensation of his incapacity increases. To be sure, both conditions are only temporary, for the analysis continues disdaining to boast of a moment of wellbeing, and continues regardlessly over the period of gloominess. One is generally pleased if it is possible to substitute the spontaneous fluctuations in the condition of the patient by such as one himself provokes and understands, just as one prefers to see in place of the spontaneous discharge of the symptoms that order of the day which corresponds to the condition of the analysis.