Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/137

Rh in their ideation, that is, until there appeared an experience, idea, or feeling which evoked such a painful affect that the person decided to forget it because he did not trust his own ability to remove the resistance between the unbearable ideas and his ego.

Such incompatible ideas originate in the feminine sex on the basis of sexual experiences and feelings. With all desired precision the patients recall their efforts of defense, their intention "to push it away," not to think of it, to repress it. As appropriate examples I can easily cite the following cases from my own experience: A young lady reproached herself because, while nursing her sick father, she thought of a young man who made a slight erotic impression on her; a governess fell in love with her employer and decided to crowd it out of her mind because it was incompatible with her pride, etc.

I am unable to maintain that the exertion of the will, in crowding such thoughts out of one's mind, is a pathological act, nor am I able to state whether and how, the intentional forgetting succeeds in these persons who remain well under the same psychic influences. I only know that in the patients whom I analyzed such "forgetting" was unsuccessful and led to either a hysteria, obsession, or a hallucinatory psychosis. The ability to produce, by the exertion of the will one of these states all of which are connected with the splitting of consciousness, is to be considered as the expression of a pathological disposition, but it need not necessarily be identified with personal or hereditary "degeneration."

Over the road leading from the patient's exertion of the will to the origin of a neurotic symptom I formed a conception which in the current psychological abstractions may be thus expressed: The task assumed by the defensive ego to treat the incompatible idea as "non arrivée" can not be directly accomplished. The memory trace as well as the affect adhering to the idea are here and can not be exterminated. The task can however, be brought to an approximate solution if it is possible to change the strong idea into a weak one and to take away the affect or sum of excitement which adheres to it. The weak idea will then exert almost no claims on the association work; but the separated sum of excitement must be utilized in another direction.

Thus far the processes are the same in hysteria, in phobias and