Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/143

Rh desire to micturate. Detailed examination showed that the desire to micturate appeared for the first time under the following conditions: A gentleman to whom she was not indifferent took a seat in the concert hall not far from her. She began to think and to picture to herself how she would sit near him as his wife. In this erotic, revery she experienced that physical feeling which must be compared to erection in the man, and which in her—I do not know whether it is general—ended in a slight desire to micturate. She now became extremely frightened over her otherwise accustomed sexual sensation because she had determined to overcome this as well as every desire, and in the next moment the affect transposed itself to the accompanying desire to micturate and forced her to leave the hall after a very painful struggle. In her life she was so prudish that she experienced an intensive horror for all things sexual, and could not conceive the thought of ever marrying; on the other hand she was sexually so hyperesthetic that during every erotic revery, which she gladly allowed herself, there appeared sensual feeling. The erection was always accompanied by the desire to micturate, and up to the time of the scene in the concert hall it had made no impression on her. The treatment led to an almost complete control of the phobia.

3. A young woman who had only one child after five years of married life complained of obsessive impulses to throw herself from the window or balcony, and of fears lest at the sight of a sharp knife she might kill her child. She admitted that the marriage relations were seldom practised and then only with caution against conception ; but she added that she did not miss this as she was not of a sensual nature. I then ventured to tell her that at the sight of a man she conceives erotic ideas, and that she therefore lost confidence in herself and imagined herself a depraved person fit for anything. The retranslation of the obsession into the sexual was successful; weeping, she soon admitted her long concealed marital misery, and then mentioned painful ideas of an unchanged sexual character such as the often recurring sensation of something forcing itself under her skirts.

I have made use of such experiences in the therapy of phobias and obsessions, and despite the patient's resistances I have redirected the attention to the repressed sexual ideas, and wherever feasible I have blocked the sources from which the same