Page:Jung - The psychology of dementia praecox.djvu/55

Rh How happy she was in all her poverty!" The voices repeated whole paragraphs of what she had just read, but the contents were of an indifferent nature. The analysis showed that while reading she at the same time entertained extraneous thoughts and that she was excited by totally different passages of the book. Against this material analogy between the couple in the romance and herself and her husband, the reminiscences of intimate things of her married life and family secrets, against all these, there arose a repressive resistance because they were connected with her sexual shyness by very simple and demonstrable streams of thought, and finally resulted in the awakening of old experiences of childhood. In consequence of the censorship exercised by the repression the harmless and idyllic passages connected with the objectionable ones by contrast and vicinity became reënforced in consciousness, enabling them to become audible. For example, the first repressed thought referred to the slander to which the secluded heroine was subjected by her neighbors. She readily found in this an analogy to herself. She, too, lived in a small place, had no intercourse with anybody and considered herself despised by her neighbors. The suspicion against the neighbors was founded on the fact that in the beginning of her married life she was obliged to content herself with a small apartment. The wall of the bedroom, near which stood the nuptial bed of the young couple, adjoined the neighbors room. With the beginning of her marriage there awakened in her a great sexual shyness. This was apparently due to an unconscious awakening of some reminiscences of childhood of having played husband and wife. She was very careful that the neighbors should not hear through the adjacent wall either words or noises, and this shyness changed into suspicion against the neighbors." On further analysis of the voices Freud often observed "a character of diplomatic uncertainty. The morbid allusions were generally deeply hidden. The continuity of some sentences was marked by strange expressions, unusual forms of speech, and, in other ways, characteristics common to the auditory hallucinations of paranoiacs. The hallucinations also showed a slight disfigurement caused by compromise formation."

I have purposely given the floor to the author of the first analysis of paranoia, a thing so highly important for psychopathology.