Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/160

146 under any peculiar circumstances, and it must be admitted that the natural expected death of an aged father does not belong to those experiences which are wont to make a healthy adult sick. The etiological analysis will perhaps seem clearer if I add that out of regard for his wife this man practiced coitus interruptus for eleven years. At all events the manifestations are precisely the same as those appearing in other persons after a short sexual injury of this nature, and without the intervention of another trauma. The same judgment may be pronounced in the case of a woman who merges into an anxiety neurosis after the death of her child, or in the case of the student who becomes disturbed by an anxiety neurosis while preparing for his final state examination. I find that here, as there, the effect is not explained by the reported etiology. One must not necessarily "overwork" himself studying, and a healthy mother is. wont to react to the death of her child with normal grief. But, above all, I would expect that the overworked student would acquire a cephalasthenia, and that mother in our example a hysteria. That both became afflicted with anxiety neurosis causes me to attach importance to the fact that the mother lived for eight years in marital coitus interruptus, and that the student entertained for three years a warm love affair with a "respectable" girl whom he was not allowed to impregnate.

These examples tend to show that where the specific sexual injury of the coitus interruptus is in itself unable to provoke an anxiety neurosis it at least predisposes to its acquisition. The anxiety neurosis then comes to light as soon as the effect of another banal injury enters into the latent effect of the specific moment. The former can quantitatively substitute the specific moment but not supplant it qualitatively. The specific moment always remains that which determines the form of neurosis. I hope to be able to prove to a greater extent this proposition for the etiology of the neurosis.

Furthermore, the last discussions contain the, not in itself, improbable assumption that a sexual injury like coitus interruptus asserts itself through summation. The time required before the effect of this summation becomes visible depends upon the predisposition of the individual and the former burdening of his nervous system. The individuals who bear coitus interruptus