Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/181

Rh was that she sees the woman in an indecent exposure, and that in the same moment the woman sees the same picture of her(!) Simultaneously with these visual hallucinations, which, after their first appearance in the asylum, disappeared again for many months, she begain to be troubled with voices which she did not recognize and could not explain. When she was in the street she heard, "This is Mrs. P.—Here she goes.—Where does she go?" Everyone of her movements and actions were commented upon. Occasionally she heard threats and reproaches. All these symptoms became worse when she was in society, or even in the street; she therefore hesitated about going out; she also stated that she experienced nausea for food, and as a result she became reduced in vitality.

I obtained this from her when she came under my care in the winter of 1895. I present this case in detail in order to make the impression that we really deal here with a very frequent form of chronic paranoia, which diagnosis will agree with the details of the symptoms and their behavior to be mentioned later. At that time she either concealed from me the delusions for the interpretation of the hallucinations or they really had not as yet occurred. Her intelligence was undiminished. It was reported to me as peculiar that she had a number of rendezvous with her brother who lived in the neighborhood, in order to confide something to him, but this she never told him. She never spoke about her hallucinations, and towards the end she did not say much about the aggravations and persecutions from which she suffered. What 1 have to report about this patient concerns the etiology of the case and the mechanism of the hallucinations. I discovered the etiology by applying Breuer's method exactly as in hysteria, for the investigation and removal of the hallucinations. I started with the presupposition that just as in the two other defense neuroses known to me this paranoia must contain unconscious thoughts and repressed reminiscences which have to be brought to consciousness, in the same manner as in the others, by overcoming a certain resistance. The patient immediately corroborated this expectation by behaving during the analysis exactly like a hysteric, and under attention to the pressure of my hand she reproduced thoughts which she could not remember having had, which she at first could not