Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/80

66 off the covers, jumped up, attempting to get hold of her and throw her down. Naturally she stopped the massage and in a moment escaped and locked herself within her own room. She evidently did not like to recall this experience and could not say whether she had seen anything when the man suddenly exposed himself. The sensations of the fingers could be explained as due to the suppressed impulse to punish him, or it might simply have originated from the fact that she was at that time massaging him. Only after this scene did she begin to talk about the one experienced yesterday after which the sensitiveness and jerkiness of the fingers appeared as a recurring memory symbol. The uncle with whom she now lived begged her to play something for him. She sat at the piano and accompanied herself singing, believing that her aunt was out. Suddenly she appeared in the doorway, Rosalie jumped up, closed the piano, and flung away the sheet of music. We can guess what memories came to her mind, and the train of thought which she tried to ward off at that moment, for the exasperation brought on by the unjust accusation should have really urged her to leave the house, but on account of her illness she was forced to remain in Vienna and had no other shelter. The movement of the fingers which I saw during the reproduction of this scene resembled a continuous jerking, as if one literally and figuratively would reject something like throwing away a sheet of music or rejecting an unreasonable demand.

She was quite positive in her assurance that she did not perceive the symptom before, that it was not caused by the scenes previously related. Was there anything else to be assumed except that the scene experienced yesterday had in the first place awakened the recollection of a former similar content and that then the formation of a memory symbol for the whole group of recollections took place? The conversion was on the one hand furnished with newly experienced affects, on the other with recollected affects.

When we consider this state of affairs we must admit that in the origin of hysterical symptoms such a process is the rule rather than the exception. Whenever I seek for the determinants of such states I frequently find not a single but a group of similar traumatic motives. In some cases it could be ascertained that this particular symptom had already existed for a short time after