Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/87

Rh penetrated deeply into her brain. She was really afraid of being looked upon suspiciously by this old lady. On reproducing this thought she burst into loud laughter and the pain ceased. Here I find nothing other than the mechanism of symbolization which in a way stands midway between the mechanism of auto-suggestion and that of conversion.

The study of Mrs. Cäcilie M. gave me the opportunity to gather a collection of such symbolizations. A whole series of physical sensations which were otherwise looked upon as organically determined were of a psychic origin, or at least furnished with a psychic interpretation. A certain number of her experiences were accompanied by a piercing sensation in the region of the heart ("I felt a stitch in my heart"). The piercing headache of hysteria was undoubtedly, in her case, to be interpreted as thought pains ("something sticks in my head"), and it disappeared each time when the problem in question was solved. The sensation of the hysterical aura in the throat, when it manifested itself during an aggravation, ran parallel with the thought, "I have to swallow that." There was a whole series of parallel running sensations and ideas in which it was now the sensation evoking the idea as an interpretation and now the idea which produced the sensation by symbolization, and not seldom it remained obscure which was the primary element of the two.

In no other patient was I able to find such a prolific application of symbolization. To be sure, Mrs. Cäcilie M. was a person of quite unusual and of a special artistic temperament whose highly developed sense for form manifested itself in very beautiful poems. I maintain, however that if a hysteria creates through symbolization a somatic sensation for the emotionally accentuated presentation, it is due less to individual and arbitrary things than one supposes. When during an offending harangue she takes literally such phrases as "stitch in the heart" or "slap in the face," and perceives them as real occurrences she practices no facetious misuse but only revives the sensations to which this phrase thanks its existence. For how does it happen that in speaking of an aggrieved person we use such expressions as "he experienced a 'stitch in his heart,'" if the mortification was not actually accompanied by a precordial sensation that could be so interpreted and recognized? Is it not probable that the phrase