Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/58

44 showed such a striking improvement both somatically and psychically that I used to remark half jokingly that during each treatment I carried away a certain number of pain motives, and that when I had cleaned them all out she would be well. She soon reached a stage during which she had no pain much of the time; she consented to walk a great deal and to give up. her hitherto condition of isolation. During the analysis I followed up now the spontaneous fluctuations of her condition and now some fragments of her sorrowful tale which in my opinion I had not sufficiently exhausted. In this work I made some interesting discoveries the principles of which I could later verify in other patients.

In the first place it was found that the spontaneous fluctuations never occurred unless provoked associatively by the events of the day. On one occasion she heard of an illness in the circle of her acquaintances which recalled to her a detail in the illness of her father. On another occasion the child of her deceased sister visited her and its resemblance to its mother recalled many painful incidents. On still another occasion it was a letter from her absent sister showing distinctly the influence of the inconsiderate brother-in-law, and this awakened a pain causing the reproduction of a family scene heretofore not reported.

As she never reproduced the same pain motives twice we were justified in the expectation that the stock would in time become exhausted. I never prevented her from merging into a situation tending to evoke new memories which had not as yet come to the surface. Thus for example I sent her to the grave of her sister, or I urged her to go in society where she was apt to meet her youthful friend who happened to be in the city.

In this manner I obtained an insight into the mode of origin of a hysteria which could be designated as mono-symptomatic. I found, for example, that the right leg became painful during our hypnosis when we dealt with memories relating to the nursing of her father, to her young friend, and to other memories occurring during the first period of the pathogenic term; while the pain in the left leg came on as soon as I evoked the memory of her lost sister, of both brothers-in-law, in brief of any impression relating to the second half of the history. My attention having been called to that by this constant behavior I went further