Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/72

58 I again repeat that this woman was not sick, that subsequent ab-reaction, despite all resemblance, is still not a hysterical process; one may ask why, after one nursing there results a hysteria and after another none. It cannot lie in personal predisposition, for the lady that I have in mind showed it very remarkably.

I now return to Miss Elisabeth v. R. While nursing her father there occurred for the first time an hysterical symptom in the form of a pain in a definite location on the right thigh. The mechanism of this symptom is fully explained on an analytical basis. It occurred in a moment during which the ideas of her duties towards her sick father came into conflict with the content of her erotic yearning which she then entertained. Under vivid self reproach she decided in favor of the former and created for herself the hysterical pain. According to the conception explained by the theory of conversion in hysteria, the process could be described as follows: She repressed the erotic idea from her consciousness and changed the sum of the affect into somatic sensations of pain. Whether this first conflict occurred only once, or repeated itself is not clear. The latter is more probable. Quite a similar conflict—of a higher moral significance, and even