Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/11

Rh and actions have their reasons. But both Bleuler and Jung are only pioneers in a new field; they are not the discoverers of this terra incognita. The honor of this belongs to Breuer and Freud.

In 1895 Breuer and Freud published the "Studien über Hysterie," in which they showed that hysterical symptoms were symbolic representations of individual experiences which were incompatible with the personality and hence repressed from consciousness. This will be best illustrated by an abstract of a case described by Freud in the aforesaid work.

Miss Lucy R., thirty years old, had been treated by a specialist for purulent rhinitis. Some time after she again applied for treatment; this time, however, she suffered from complete anosmia and was almost constantly annoyed by two subjective sensations of smell. She was also depressed and anergic, complained of a heavy head, loss of appetite and inability to work. As no local affection could then be found to account for these symptoms she was recommended to Freud.

Besides the symptoms enumerated above Freud found distinct hysterical symptoms. She showed a general analgesia without any disturbances of tactile sensation. The nasal mucous membrane was totally analgesic and its reflexes absent. Freud then thought that the subjective sensations of smell and the depression were equivalents for hysterical attacks, that those odors were once objective and due to some trauma, and that they returned to memory in the form of symbols of subjective sensation. But in order to assume this theory it was absolutely necessary that the subjective sensations of smell should show such a specialization as to correspond with the real object of their origin. When the patient was asked to describe the odor which annoyed her most, she stated that it was like "burned pastry." It was therefore assumed that the odor of burned pastry was probably some actual traumatic experience. Her history was uneventful; she was a governess, having the care of two children whose mother died a few years ago, the father being a manufacturer in the suburbs of Vienna. The odor of burned pastry was taken as the