Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/73

Rh better demonstrated by the analysis—repeated itself after years and led to the aggravation of the same pain and to its dissemination beyond its original limits. Again, it was an erotic idea which came into conflict with all her moral conceptions, for her affection for her brother-in-law, both during the life and after the death of her sister, and the thought that she should yearn just for this man, was to her very disagreeable. This analysis gives detailed information about this conflict which represents the pivotal point in the history of her malady. The patient's affection for her brother-in-law might have begun to germinate long ago, but in favor of its development was the physical exhaustion through the recent nursing, and her moral exhaustion through years of disillusionment which then began to break down her reserve and she confessed to herself the need of the love of a man. During a friendly intercourse continuing for weeks (in the summer resort) this erotic inclination reached its full development simultaneously with the pain. The analysis shows a special psychic condition of the patient at that time, which in connection with her inclination and the pain, seems to afford an understanding of the process in the sense of the conversion theory.

I place reliance on the opinion that the patient's affection for her brother-in-law, intensive as it was, was not clearly known to her except on certain rare occasions and then only momentarily. If that were not so she would have become conscious of the inconsistency between this fondness and her moral ideas and would have had to endure the same mental agony which I saw her suffer after the analysis. Her reminiscences gave us no information concerning such suffering. These she spared herself and as a result the love itself did not become clear to her. At that time, as well as during the analysis, her love for her brother-in-law existed in the form of a foreign body in her consciousness without entering into any relationship with her other condition. In reference to this love there existed the peculiar condition of knowing and simultaneously not knowing, it was the condition of the split-off psychic group. When we assert that this love was not "clearly known" to her we mean exactly what we say. We do not mean a lower quality or a lesser degree of consciousness, but a separation of the free associative thinking process from the rest of ideation.