Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/227

Rh which we psychoanalysts have to tell the world will meet the same fate, only it will not come so rapidly; we must be able to wait.

I must finally explain what I mean by the "General Effects" of our work, and how I came to put hopes upon them. Here we meet with a very remarkable therapeutic constellation, the like of which is perhaps not to be found elsewhere. Until you will recognize in it something long familiar, it will at first appear strange to you. For you know that- the psychoneuroses are distorted, substitutive gratifications of impulses the existence of which one must deny to himself and to others. Their capacity to exist rests on this distortion and misjudgment. With the solution of the riddle they present and with the acceptance of this solution by the patients these morbid states become incapable of existence. There is hardly anything like it in medicine; in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose charm is broken as soon as one can tell them their secretly concealed name.

Now, instead of the individual patient, put all those suffering from neuroses,—society made up of healthy and abnormal persons—instead of the-acceptance of the solution there, put here the general recognition, and a moment's reflection will then convince you that the results will not be changed by this substitution.

The success which the therapy can have in the individual must also appear in the masses. The patients could not make known their divers neuroses such as their anxious exaggerated love which conceals their hatred, their agoraphobia which tells of disappointed ambitions, their compulsive actions which represent their reproaches for, and safeguards against evil resolutions,—I say they could not bring them to light if their relatives and friends from whom they wish to conceal their psychic processes would know the general meaning of the symptoms. Or if they knew that whatever they produce in their morbid manifestations could really be interpreted by others. But the effect will not confine itself to the concealing of the symptoms,—after all inaccomplishable—for this forced concealment makes the illness inavailable. The communication of the secret attacks the most delicate point of the "etiologic adjustment," which gives origin to the neuroses. What is gained by the disease becomes illusory and hence the only possible result of the changed state of affairs