Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/215

 CHAPTER XI. During my consultation hours some days ago an elderly woman called on me accompanied by a protecting friend and complained of states of anxiety. She was in the latter half of her fortieth year, quite well preserved and seemingly had not yet reached her menopause. The separation from her last husband was supposed to have been the cause of her disease, but according to her statement the anxiety had considerably increased since she had consulted a young physician in her suburban town. He explained to her that the cause of her anxiety lay in her sexual demands; that she could not dispense with sexual relations and that for that reason she had only three roads to health—either to return to her husband, to take a lover or to gratify herself. Since that time she became convinced that she was incurable as she did not wish to return to her husband and her moral and religious feelings were against the other two measures. She came to me because the physician had told her that this was a new viewpoint for which I was responsible and urged her to come to me for corroboration of the definite assertions. Her friend, a still older, embittered and unhealthy looking woman, then adjured me to assure the patient that this physician had been mistaken. She insisted that his statement could not be true for she herself had been a widow for many years and remained respectable without suffering from states of anxiety.

I shall not dwell upon the delicate situation into which I was placed by this visit but I shall explain the conduct of the colleague who had sent me this patient. First, I wish to advise caution which is perhaps—or let us hope—not superfluous. Experience of many years has taught me—as it could teach everyone else—not to accept readily as true that which patients, particularly nervous ones, relate in regard to their physician. No matter what the treatment is the neurologist not only becomes the target for the manifold hostile feelings of the patient, but through a form of 201