Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/180

166 Mrs. P. thirty-two years old, married three years. She is the mother of a two-year-old child, and does not descend from nervous parents; but her sister and brother, whom I know, are also neurotic. It was doubtful whether she was not transitorily depressed and mistaken in her judgment in the middle of her twentieth year. During the last years she was healthy and capacitated until she evinced the first symptoms of the present illness, six months after the birth of her child. She became secluded and suspicious, showing a disinclination towards social relations with the relatives of her husband, and complained that the neighbors in the little town now behaved towards her in a rather impolite and regardless manner. Gradually these complaints grew in intensity, she thought that there was something against her, though she had no notion what it could be. But there was no doubt that all the relatives and friends denied her respect, and did everything to aggravate her. She was trying very hard to find out whence this came but could not discover anything. Some time later she complained that she was watched, that her thoughts were guessed, and that everything that happened in her house was known. One afternoon she suddenly conceived the thought that she was watched during the evening while undressing. Since then she applied while undressing the most complicated precautionary measures. She slipped into her bed in the darkness and undressed only under cover. As she avoided all social relations, and took but little nourishment, and was very depressed, she was sent in the summer of 1895 to a hydrotherapeutic institute. There new symptoms appeared and reinforced those already existing. As early as the spring, while she was alone with the servant girl, she suddenly perceived a sensation in her lap, and thought that the servant girl then had an unseemly thought. This sensation became more frequent in the summer, it was almost continuous, and she felt her genitals "as if one feels a heavy hand." She then began to see pictures which frightened her; they were hallucinations of female nakedness, especially an exposed woman's lap with hair; occasionally she also saw male genitals. The picture of the hairy lap and the organic sensation in the lap usually came conjointly. The pictures became very aggravating, as she regularly perceived them when she was in the company of a woman, and the thought accompanying them