Freud - Complete Works (11 page)

   This series of traumatic
precipitating causes which she produced in answer to my question
why she was so liable to fright was clearly ready to hand in her
memory. She could not have collected these episodes from different
periods of her childhood so quickly during the short interval which
elapsed between my question and her answer. At the end of each
separate story she twitched all over and took on a look of fear and
horror. At the end of the last one she opened her mouth wide and
panted for breath. The words in which she described the terrifying
subject-matter of her experience were pronounced with difficulty
and between gasps. Afterwards her features became peaceful.

  
¹ A species of migraine.

Studies On Hysteria

51

   In reply to a question she told
me that while she was describing these scenes she saw them before
her, in a plastic form: and in their natural colours. She said that
in general she thought of these experiences very often and had done
so in the last few days. Whenever this happened she saw these
scenes with all the vividness of reality.¹ I now understand
why she entertains me so often with animal scenes and pictures of
corpses. My therapy consists in wiping away these pictures, so that
she is no longer able to see them before her. To give support to my
suggestion I stroked her several times over the eyes.

  
May 9
. - Without my having
given her any further suggestion, she had slept well. But she had
gastric pains in the morning. They came on yesterday in the garden
where, she stayed out too long with her children. She agreed to my
limiting the children’s visits to two and a half hours. A few
days ago she had reproached herself for leaving the children by
themselves. I found her in a somewhat excited state to-day; her
forehead was lined, her speech was halting and she made her
clacking noises. While she was being massaged she told me only that
the children’s governess had brought her an ethnological
atlas and that some pictures in it of American Indians dressed up
as animals had given her a great shock. ‘Only think, if they
came to life!’ (She shuddered.)

  
¹
Many other hysterical patients have
reported to us that they have memories of this kind in vivid visual
pictures and that this applied especially to their pathogenic
memories.

Studies On Hysteria

52

   Under hypnosis I asked why she
had been so much frightened by these pictures, since she was no
longer afraid of animals. She said they had reminded her of visions
she had had (when she was nineteen) at the time of her
brother’s death. (I shall hold over enquiring into this
memory until later.) I then asked her whether she had always spoken
with a stammer and how long she had had her
tic
(the
peculiar clacking sound).¹ Her stammering, she said, had come
on while she was ill; she had had the
tic
for the last five
years, ever since a time when she this was sitting by the bedside
of her younger daughter who was very ill, and had wanted to keep
absolutely
quiet
. I tried to reduce the importance of this
memory, by pointing out that after all nothing had happened to her
daughter, and so on. The thing came on, she said, whenever she was
apprehensive or frightened. I instructed her not to be frightened
of the pictures of the Red Indians but to laugh heartily at them
and even to draw my attention to them. And this did in fact happen
after she had woken up: she looked at the book, asked whether I had
seen it, opened it at the page and laughed out loud at the
grotesque figures, without a trace of fear and without any strain
in her features. Dr. Breuer came in suddenly with the
house-physician to visit her. She was frightened and began to make
her clacking noise, so that they soon left us. She explained that
she was so much agitated because she was unpleasantly affected by
the fact that the house-physician came in every time as well.

   I had also got rid of her gastric
pains during the hypnosis by stroking her, and I told her that
though she would expect the pain to return after her midday meal it
would not do so.

  
Evening
. - For the first
time she was cheerful and talkative and gave evidence of a sense of
humour that I should not have expected in such a serious woman;
and, among other things, in the strong feeling that she was better,
she made fun of her treatment by my medical predecessor. She had
long intended, she said, to give up that treatment but had not been
able to find the right method of doing so till a chance remark made
by Dr. Breuer, when he visited her once, showed her a way out. When
I seemed to be surprised at this, she grew frightened and began to
blame herself very severely for having been indiscreet. But I was
able, it seemed, to re-assure her. - She had had no gastric pains,
though she had expected them.

  
¹
I had already asked her this question about
the
tic
during her waking state, and she had replied:
‘I don’t know; oh, a very long time.’

Studies On Hysteria

53

   Under hypnosis I asked her to tell
me further experiences which had given her a lasting fright. She
produced a second series of this kind, dating from her later youth,
with as much promptitude as the first series and she assured me
once more that all these scenes appeared before her often, vividly
and in colours. One of them was of how she saw a female cousin
taken off to an insane asylum (when she was fifteen). She tried to
call for help but was unable to, and lost her power of speech till
the evening of the same day. Since she talked so often about
asylums in her waking state, I interrupted her and asked on what
other occasions she had been concerned with insanity. She told me
that her mother had herself been in an asylum for some time. They
had once had a maid-servant one of whose previous mistresses had
spent a long time in an asylum and who used to tell her horrifying
stories of how the patients were tied to chairs, beaten, and so on.
As she told me this she clenched her hands in horror; she saw all
this before her eyes. I endeavoured to correct her ideas about
insane asylums, and assured her that she would be able to hear
about institutions of this kind without referring them to herself.
At this, her features relaxed.

   She continued her list of
terrifying memories. One, at fifteen, of how she found her mother,
who had had a stroke, lying on the floor (her mother lived for
another four years); again, at nineteen, how she came home one day
and found her mother dead, with a distorted face. I naturally had
considerable difficulty in mitigating these memories. After a
rather lengthy explanation, I assured her that this picture, too,
would only appear to her again indistinctly and without strength. -
Another memory was how, at nineteen, she lifted up a stone and
found a toad under it, which made her lose her power of speech for
hours afterwards.¹

   During this hypnosis I convinced
myself that she knew everything that happened in the last hypnosis,
whereas in waking life she knows nothing of it.

  
¹
A special kind of symbolism must, no doubt,
have lain behind the toad, but I unfortunately neglected to enquire
into it.

Studies On Hysteria

54

  
May 10, morning
. - For the
first time to-day she was given a bran bath instead of her usual
warm bath. I found her looking cross and with a pinched face, with
her hands wrapped in a shawl. She complained of cold and pains.
When I asked her what was the matter, she told me that the bath had
been uncomfortably short to sit in and had brought on pains. During
the massage she started by saying that she still felt badly about
having given Dr. Breuer away yesterday. I pacified her with a white
lie and said that I had known about it all along, where upon her
agitation (clacking, grimaces) ceased. So each time even while I am
massaging her, my influence has already begun to affect her; she
grows quieter and clearer in the head, and even without questioning
under hypnosis can discover the cause of her ill-humour on that
day. Nor is her conversation during the massage so aimless as would
appear. On the contrary, it contains a fairly complete reproduction
of the memories and new impressions which have affected her since
our last talk, and it often leads on, in a quite unexpected way, to
pathogenic reminiscences of which she unburdens herself without
being asked to. It is as though she had adopted my procedure and
was making use of our conversation, apparently unconstrained and
guided by chance, as a supplement to her hypnosis. For instance,
to-day she began talking about her family, and in a very roundabout
way got on to the subject of a cousin. He was rather queer in the
head and his parents had all his teeth pulled out at one sitting.
She accompanied the story with horrified looks and kept repeating
her protective formula (‘Keep still! - Don’t say
anything! - Don’t touch me!’). After this her face
smoothed out and she became cheerful. Thus, her behaviour in waking
life is directed by the experiences she has had during her
somnambulism, in spite of her believing, while she is awake, that
she knows nothing about them.

Studies On Hysteria

55

   Under hypnosis I repeated my
question as to what it was that had made her upset and I got the
same answers but in the reverse order: (1) her indiscreet talk
yesterday, and (2) her pains caused by her being so uncomfortable
in the bath. - I asked her to-day the meaning of her phrase
'Keep still!’, etc. She explained that when she had
frightening thoughts she was afraid of their being interrupted in
their course, because then everything would get confused and things
would be even worse. The ‘Keep still!’ related to the
fact that the animal shapes which appeared to her when she was in a
bad state started moving and began to attack her if anyone made a
movement in her presence. The final injunction 'Don’t
touch me!’ was derived from the following experiences. She
told me how, when her brother had been so ill from taking a lot of
morphine - she was nineteen at the time- he used often to seize
hold of her; and how, another time, an acquaintance had suddenly
gone mad in the house and had caught her by the arm; (there was a
third, similar instance, which she did not remember exactly;, and
lastly, how, when she was twenty-eight and her daughter was very
ill, the child had caught hold of her so forcibly, in its delirium
that she was almost choked. Though these four instances were so
widely separated in time, she told me them in a single sentence and
in such rapid succession that they might have been a single episode
in four acts. Incidentally, all the accounts she gave of traumas
arranged like these in groups began with a ‘how’, the
component traumas being separated by an ‘and’. Since I
noticed that the protective formula was designed to safeguard her
against a recurrence of such experiences, I removed this fear by
suggestion, and in fact I never heard the formula from her
again.

  
Evening
. - I found her
very cheerful. She told me, with a laugh, that she had been
frightened by a small dog which barked at her in the garden. Her
face was a little bit drawn, however, and there was some internal
agitation which did not disappear until she had asked me whether I
was annoyed by something she had said during the massage this
morning and I had said ‘no’. Her period began again
to-day after an interval of scarcely a fortnight. I promised to
regulate this by hypnotic suggestion and, under hypnosis, set the
interval at 28 days.¹

   Under hypnosis, I also asked her
whether she remembered the last thing she told me; in asking this
what I had in mind was a task which had been left over from
yesterday evening; but she began quite correctly with the
‘don’t touch me’ from
this morning’s
hypnosis. So I took her back to yesterday’s topic. I had
asked her the origin of her stammering and she had replied,
‘I don’t know’.² I had therefore requested
her to remember it by the time of to-day’s hypnosis. She
accordingly answered me to-day without any further reflection but
in great agitation and with spastic impediments to her speech:
‘How the horses bolted once with the children in the
carriage; and how another time I was driving through the forest
with the children in a thunderstorm, and a tree just in front of
the horses was struck by lightning and the horses shied and I
thought: "You must keep quite still now, or your screaming
will frighten the horses even more and the coachman won’t be
able to hold them in at all." It came on from that
moment.’ She was quite unusually excited as she told me this
story. I further learnt from her that the stammer had begun
immediately after the first of these two occasions, but had
disappeared shortly afterwards and then came on for good after the
second, similar occasion. I extinguished her plastic memory of
these scenes, but asked her to imagine them once more. She appeared
to try to do this and remained quiet as she did so; and from now on
she spoke in the hypnosis without any spastic impediment.³

  
¹
A suggestion which was carried
out.

  
²
  It is possible that this answer,
‘I don’t know’, was correct; but it may quite as
well have indicated reluctance to talk about the causes of the
stammering. I have since observed in other patients that the
greater the effort they have made to repress a thing from their
consciousness the more difficulty they have in remembering it under
hypnosis as well as in waking life.