Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/140

126 I will now state what parts demanded in this theory can be directly demonstrated and what parts I have supplemented. Besides the end product of the process, the obsession, we can in the first place directly demonstrate the source from which the affect in the false connection originates. In all cases that I have analyzed it was the sexual life that has furnished a painful affect of precisely the same character as the one attached to the obsession. It is not theoretically excluded that this affect could not occasionally originate in other spheres, but I must say that thus far I have found no other origin. Moreover, one can readily understand that it is precisely the sexual life which furnishes the most manifold occasions for the appearance of unbearable ideas.

Moreover, the exertion of the will, the attempt at defence, upon which this theory lays stress is demonstated by the most unequivocal utterances of the patients. At least in a number of cases the patients themselves inform us that the phobia or obsession appeared only after the exertion of the will manifestly gained its point. "Something very disagreeable happened to me once and I have exerted all my power to push it away, not to think of it. When I have finally succeeded I have gotten the other thing instead, which I have not lost since." With these words a patient verified the main points of the theory here developed.

Not all who suffer from obsessions are so clear concerning the origin of the same. As a rule when we call the patient's attention to the original idea of a sexual nature we receive the following answer: "It could not have come from that. Why I have not thought much about it. For a moment I was frightened, then I distracted myself and since then it has not bothered me." In this, so frequent objection, we have the proof that the obsession represents a compensation or substitute for the unbearable sexual idea, and that it has taken its place in consciousness.

Between the patient's exertion of the will which succeeds in repressing the unacceptable sexual idea and the appearance of the obsession, which though in itself of little intensity, is here furnished with inconceivably strong affect, there is a yawning gap which the theory here developed will fill. The separation of the sexual idea from its affect and the connection of the latter with another suitable but not unbearable idea—these are processes which take place unconsciously which we can only presume but not