Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/79

Rh with friendliness, but just for that reason she incurred the dis-pleasure of her aunt. The latter believed that her husband evinced too marked an interest in his niece and made it a point of opposing the girl's stay in Vienna. She herself in her youth was obliged to relinquish a desire of becoming an artist and was now jealous of her n^i^e because she had the opportunity to develop her talent not considering that it was not mere desire but a wish to become independent which led her neice to take this step. Rosalia felt so uncomfortable in the house that she for instance, did not dare to sing or play the piano when her aunt was within hearing distance, and carefully avoided either singing or playing anything for her aged uncle brother of her mother—whenever her aunt was home. While I was endeavoring to efface the traces of the old excitements, new ones originated through these relations with her host and finally interfered with the success of my treatment and prematurely interrupted the cure.

One day the patient came to me with a new symptom hardly twenty-four hours old. She complained of a disagreeable prickling sensation in the fingertips which had manifested itself every few hours since the day before and forced her to make very peculiar jerky movements with the fingers. I could not see the attack, otherwise I would have guessed its meaning on seeing the finger movements but I immediately endeavored to trace through hypnotic analysis the causation of this symptom (it was really a minor hysterical attack). As the whole thing only existed for a short time I hoped to be able to explain it and quickly remove it. To my surprise without any hesitation she reproduced in chronological order a whole row of scenes beginning in her early childhood. All these had perhaps the same characteristics in the fact that she had suffered an injustice without defense, something which could make her fingers jerk, for example, scenes like the one of being forced to hold out her hand in school while her teacher struck it with a ruler. But they were all banal causes the right of which to enter into the etiology of an hysterical symptom I have already opposed. It was different, however, with one scene of her early girlhood which was connected with the others. The bad uncle who suffered from rheumatism asked hinS to massage his back. She did not dare refuse him. He was in bed while she was doing it and suddenly threw