Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/178

164 Or the patient tries to become master of every compulsive idea through logical labor and by appealing to his conscious memory; this leads to compulsive thinking and examination to doubting mania. The priority of the perception before the memory in these examinations at first induce and then force the patient to collect and preserve all objects with which he comes in contact. The secondary defense against the compulsive affects results in a greater number of defensive measures which are capable of being transformed into compulsive actions. These can be grouped according to their tendency. We may have measures of penitence (irksome ceremonial and observation of numbers), of prevention (diverse phobias, superstition, pedantry, aggravation of the primary symptom of scrupulousness), measures of fear of betrayal (collecting papers and shyness), and measures of becoming unconscious (dipsomania). Among these compulsive acts and impulses the phobias play the greatest part as limitations of the patient's existence.

There are cases in which we can observe how the compulsion becomes transferred from the idea or affect to the measure, and other cases in which the compulsion oscillates between the returning symptoms of secondary defense. But there are also cases in which no obsessions are really formed, but the repressed reminiscence immediately becomes replaced by the apparent primary defensive measure. Here that stage is attained at a bound which otherwise ends the course of the compulsion neurosis only after the conflict of the defense. Grave cases of this affection end either with a fixation of ceremonial actions, general doubting mania, or in an existence of eccentricity conditioned by phobias.

That the obsessions and everything derived from them are not believed is probably due to the fact that the defense symptom of scrupulousness was formed during the first repression and gained compulsive validity. The certainty of having lived morally throughout the whole period of the successful defense makes it impossible to give credence to the reproach which the obsession really involves. Only transitorily during the appearance of a new obsession, and now and then in melancholic exhaustive states of the ego do the morbid symptoms of the return also enforce the belief. The "compulsion" of the psychic formations here described has in general nothing to do with the recognition through