Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/185

Rh "The Heiterethei" by O. Ludwig, and noticed that while reading she was preoccupied with incoming thoughts. Immediately after she took a walk on the highway and suddenly while passing a peasant's cottage the voices told her, "That is how the house of the Heiterethei looked! Here is the well, and here is the bush! How happy she was in all her poverty! "The voices then repeated whole paragraphs of what she had just read, but it remained incomprehensible why house, bush, and well of the Heiterethei, and just such indifferent and most irrelevant passages of the romance should have obtruded themselves upon her attention with pathological strength. The analysis showed that while reading she at the same time entertained extraneous thoughts, and that she was excited by totally different passages of the book. Against this material analogy between the couple of the romance and herself and her husband, the reminiscence of intimate things of her married life and family secrets, against all these there arose a repressive resistance because they were connected with her sexual shyness by very simple and demonstrable streams of thought, and finally resulted in the awakening of old experiences of childhood. In consequence of the censorship exercised by the repression the harmless and idyllic passages connected with the objectionable ones by contrast and vicinity, became reinforced in consciousness, enabling them to become audible. For example, the first repressed thought referred to the slander to which the secluded heroine was subjected by her neighbors. She readily found in this an analogy to herself. She, too, lived in a small place, had no intercourse with anybody and considered herself despised by her neighbors. The suspicion against the neighbors was founded on the fact that in the beginning of her married life she was obliged to content herself with a small apartment. The wall of the bedroom, near which stood the nuptial bed of the young couple, adjoined the neighbors' room. With the beginning of her marriage there awakened in her a great sexual shyness. This was apparently due to an unconscious awakening of some reminiscences of childhood of having played husband and wife. She was very careful lest the neighbors might hear through the adjacent wall either words or noises and this shyness changed into suspicion against the neighbors.

The voices therefore owed their origin to the repression of