Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/93

Rh hysteria. Breuer's patient, Anna O., seems to contradict this and exemplifies a pure hysterical disease. Yet this case which became so fruitful for the knowledge of hysteria was never considered by its observer under the guise of a sexual neurosis and hence cannot at present be utilized as such. When I began to analyze the second patient, Mrs. Emmy v. N., the idea of a sexual neurosis on a hysterical basis was far from my mind. I had just returned from the Charcot school, and considered the connection of hysteria with the sexual theme as a sort of insult—just as my patients were wont to do. But when I today review my notes on this case there is absolutely no doubt that I have to consider it as a severe case of anxiety neurosis with anxious expectations and phobias, which was due to sexual abstinence and was combined with hysteria.

The third case. Miss Lucy R., could perhaps be called the first borderline case of pure hysteria. It is a short episodic hysteria based on an unmistakably sexual etiology. It corresponds to an anxiety neurosis in an over-ripe, amorous girl, whose love was too rapidly awakened through a misunderstanding. Yet the anxiety neurosis could either not be demonstrated or had escaped me. Case IV, Katharina, is really a model of what I have called virginal anxiety; it is a combination of an anxiety neurosis and hysteria, the former produces the symptoms, while the latter repeats them and works with them. At all events, it is a typical case of many juvenile neuroses called "hysteria." Case V, Miss Elisabeth v. R., was again not investigated as a sexual neurosis. I could only suspect that there was a spinal neurasthenia at its basis but I could not confirm it. I must, however, add that since then pure hysterias have become still rarer in my experience. That in grouping together these four cases of hysteria I could disregard in the discussion the decisive factors of sexual neuroses was due to the fact that they were older cases in which I had not as yet carried out the purposed and urgent investigation for the neurotic sexual subsoil. Moreover the reason for my reporting four instead of twelve cases of