Freud - Complete Works (24 page)

   ‘No.’

   ‘Do you know what your
attacks come from?’

   ‘No.’

   ‘When did you first have
them?’

Studies On Hysteria

113

   ‘Two years ago, while I was
still living on the other mountain with my aunt. (She used to run a
refuge hut there, and we moved here eighteen months ago.) But they
keep on happening.’

   Was I to make an attempt at an
analysis? I could not venture to transplant hypnosis to these
altitudes, but perhaps I might succeed with a simple talk. I should
have to try a lucky guess. I had found often enough that in girls
anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is
overcome when it is faced for the first time with the world of
sexuality.¹

   So I said: ‘If you
don’t know, I’II tell you how
I
think you got
your attacks. At that time, two years ago, you must have seen or
heard something that very much embarrassed you, and that
you’d much rather not have seen.’

   ‘Heavens, yes!’ she
replied, ‘that was when I caught my uncle with the girl, with
Franziska, my cousin.’

   ‘What’s this story
about a girl? Won’t you tell me all about it?’

   ‘You can say
anything
to a doctor, I suppose. Well, at that time, you
know, my uncle - the husband of the aunt you’ve seen here -
kept the inn on the ---kogel. Now they’re divorced, and
it’s my fault they were divorced, because it was through me
that it came out that he was carrying on with Franziska.’

   ‘And how did you discover
it?’

   ‘This way. One day two
years ago some gentlemen had climbed the mountain and asked for
something to eat. My aunt wasn’t at home, and Franziska, who
always did the cooking, was nowhere to be found. And my uncle was
not to be found either. We looked everywhere, and at last Alois,
the little boy, my cousin, said: "Why, Franziska must be in
Father’s room!" And we both laughed; but we
weren’t thinking anything bad. Then we went to my
uncle’s room but found it locked. That seemed strange to me.
Then Alois said: "There’s a window in the passage where
you can look into the room." We went into the passage; but
Alois wouldn’t go to the window and said he was afraid. So I
said: "You silly boy! I’II go, I’m not a bit
afraid." And I had nothing bad in my mind. I looked in. The
room was rather dark, but I saw my uncle and Franziska; he was
lying on her.’

  
¹
I will quote here the case in which I first
recognized this causal connection. I was treating a young married
woman who was suffering from a complicated neurosis and, once
again, was unwilling to admit that her illness arose from her
married life. She objected that while she was still a girl she had
had attacks of anxiety, ending in fainting fits. I remained firm.
When we had come to know each other better she suddenly said to me
one day: ‘I’ll tell you now how I came by my attacks
of anxiety when I was a girl. At that time I used to sleep in a
room next to my parents’; the door was left open and a
night-light used to burn on the table. So more than once I saw my
father get into bed with my mother and heard sounds that greatly
excited me. It was then that my attacks came on.’

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114

   ‘Well?’

   ‘I came away from the
window at once, and leant up against the wall and couldn’t
get my breath - just what happens to me since. Everything went
blank, my eyelids were forced together and there was a hammering
and buzzing in my head.’

  ‘Did you tell your aunt that very
same day?’

   ‘Oh no, I said
nothing.’

   ‘Then why were you so
frightened when you found them together? Did you understand it? Did
you know what was going on?’

   ‘Oh no. I didn’t
understand anything at that time. I was only sixteen. I don’t
know what I was frightened about.’

   ‘Fräulein Katharina,
if you could remember now what was happening in you at that time,
when you had your first attack, what you thought about it - it
would help you.’

   ‘Yes, if I could. But I was
so frightened that I’ve forgotten everything.’

   (Translated into the terminology
of our ‘Preliminary Communication’, this means:
‘The affect itself created a hypnoid state, whose products
were then cut off from associative connection with the
ego-consciousness.’)

   ‘Tell me, Fräulein.
Can it be that the head that you always see when you lose your
breath is Franziska’s head, as you saw it then?’

   ‘Oh no, she didn’t
look so awful. Besides, it’s a man’s head.’

   ‘Or perhaps your
uncle’s?’

   ‘I didn’t see his
face as clearly as that. It was too dark in the room. And why
should he have been making such a dreadful face just
then?’

   ‘You’re quite
right.’

   (The road suddenly seemed
blocked. Perhaps something might turn up in the rest of her
story.)

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115

   ‘And what happened
then?’

   ‘Well, those two must have
heard a noise, because they came out soon afterwards. I felt very
bad the whole time. I always kept thinking about it. Then two days
later it was a Sunday and there was a great deal to do and I worked
all day long. And on the Monday morning I felt giddy again and was
sick, and I stopped in bed and was sick without stopping for three
days.’

   We had often compared the
symptomatology of hysteria with a pictographic script which has
become intelligible after the discovery of a few bilingual
inscriptions. In that alphabet being sick means disgust. So I said:
‘If you were sick three days later, I believe that means that
when you looked into the room you felt disgusted.’

   ‘Yes, I’m sure I felt
disgusted,’ she said reflectively, ‘but disgusted at
what?’

   ‘Perhaps you saw something
naked? What sort of state were they in?’

   ‘It was too dark to see
anything; besides they both of them had their clothes on. Oh, if
only I knew what it was I felt disgusted at!’

  
I
had no idea either. But
I told her to go on and tell me whatever occurred to her, in the
confident expectation that she would think of precisely what I
needed to explain the case.

   Well, she went on to describe how
at last she reported her discovery to her aunt, who found that she
was changed and suspected her of concealing some secret. There
followed some very disagreeable scenes between her uncle and aunt,
in the course of which the children came to hear a number of things
which opened their eyes in many ways and which it would have been
better for them not to have heard. At last her aunt decided to move
with her children and niece and take over the present inn, leaving
her uncle alone with Franziska, who had meanwhile become pregnant.
After this, however, to my astonishment she dropped these threads
and began to tell me two sets of older stories, which went back two
or three years earlier than the traumatic moment. The first set
related to occasions on which the same uncle had made sexual
advances to her herself, when she was only fourteen years old. She
described how she had once gone with him on an expedition down into
the valley in the winter and had spent the night in the inn there.
He sat in the bar drinking and playing cards, but she felt sleepy
and went up to bed early in the room they were to share on the
upper floor. She was not quite asleep when he came up; then she
fell asleep again and woke up suddenly ‘feeling his
body’ in the bed. She jumped up and remonstrated with him:
‘What are you up to, Uncle? Why don’t you stay in your
own bed?’ He tried to pacify her: ‘Go on, you silly
girl, keep still. You don’t know how nice it is.’ -
‘I don’t like your "nice" things; you
don’t even let one sleep in peace.’ She remained
standing by the door, ready to take refuge outside in the passage,
till at last he gave up and went to sleep himself. Then she went
back to her own bed and slept till morning. From the way in which
she reported having defended herself it seems to follow that she
did not clearly recognize the attack as a sexual one. When I asked
her if she knew what he was trying to do to her, she replied:
‘Not at the time.’ It had become clear to her much
later on, she said; she had resisted because it was unpleasant to
be disturbed in one’s sleep and ‘because it
wasn’t nice’.

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116

   I have been obliged to relate
this in detail, because of its great importance for understanding
everything that followed. - She went on to tell me of yet other
experiences of somewhat later date: how she had once again had to
defend herself against him in an inn when he was completely drunk,
and similar stories. In answer to a question as to whether on these
occasions she had felt anything resembling her later loss of
breath, she answered with decision that she had every time felt the
pressure on her eyes and chest, but with nothing like the strength
that had characterized the scene of discovery.

   Immediately she had finished this
set of memories she began to tell me a second set, which dealt with
occasions on which she had noticed something between her uncle and
Franziska. Once the whole family had spent the night in their
clothes in a hay loft and she was woken up suddenly by a noise; she
thought she noticed that her uncle, who had been lying between her
and Franziska, was turning away, and that Franziska was just lying
down. Another time they were stopping the night at an inn at the
village of N--; she and her uncle were in one room and Franziska in
an adjoining one. She woke up suddenly in the night and saw a tall
white figure by the door, on the point of turning the handle:
‘Goodness, is that you, Uncle? What are you doing at the
door?’ - ‘Keep quiet. I was only looking for
something.’ - ‘But the way out’s by the
other
door.’ - ‘I’d just made a
mistake’ . . . and so on.

Studies On Hysteria

117

   I asked her if she had been
suspicious at that time. ‘No, I didn’t think anything
about it; I only just noticed it and thought no more about
it.’ When I enquired whether she had been frightened on these
occasions too, she replied that she thought so, but she was not so
sure of it this time.

   At the end of these two sets of
memories she came to a stop, She was like someone transformed. The
sulky, unhappy face had grown lively, her eyes were bright, she was
lightened and exalted. Meanwhile the understanding of her case had
become clear to me. The later part of what she had told me, in an
apparently aimless fashion, provided an admirable explanation of
her behaviour at the scene of the discovery. At that time she had
carried about with her two sets of experiences which she remembered
but did not understand, and from which she drew no inferences. When
she caught sight of the couple in intercourse, she at once
established a connection between the new impression and these two
sets of recollections, she began to understand them and at the same
time to fend them off. There then followed a short period of
working-out, of ‘incubation’, after which the symptoms
of conversion set in, the vomiting as a substitute for moral and
physical disgust. This solved the riddle. She had not been
disgusted by the sight of the two people but by the memory which
that sight had stirred up in her. And, taking everything into
account, this could only be the memory of the attempt on her at
night when she had ‘felt her uncle’s body’.

   So when she had finished her
confession I said to her: ‘I know now what it was you thought
when you looked into the room. You thought: "Now he’s
doing with her what he wanted to do with me that night and those
other times." That was what you were disgusted at, because you
remembered the feeling when you woke up in the night and felt his
body.’

   ‘It may well be,’ she
replied, ‘that that was what I was disgusted at and that that
was what I thought.’

   'Tell me just one thing more.
You’re a grown-up girl now and know all sorts of things . .
.’

   ‘Yes, now I am.’

   ‘Tell me just one thing.
What part of his body was it that you felt that night?’

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118

   But she gave me no more definite
answer. She smiled in an embarrassed way, as though she had been
found out, like someone who is obliged to admit that a fundamental
position has been reached where there is not much more to be said.
I could imagine what the tactile sensation was which she had later
learnt to interpret. Her facial expression seemed to me to be
saying that she supposed that I was right in my conjecture. But I
could not penetrate further, and in any case I owed her a debt of
gratitude for having made it so much easier for me to talk to her
than to the prudish ladies of my city practice, who regard whatever
is natural as shameful.

   Thus the case was cleared up. -
But stop a moment! What about the recurrent hallucination of the
head, which appeared during her attacks and struck terror into her?
Where did it come from?  I proceeded to ask her about it, and,
as though
her
knowledge, too, had been extended by our
conversation, she promptly replied: ‘Yes, I know now. The
head is my uncle’s head - I recognize it now - but not from
that
time. Later, when all the disputes had broken out, my
uncle gave way to a senseless rage against me. He kept saying that
it was all my fault: if I hadn’t chattered, it would never
have come to a divorce. He kept threatening he would do something
to me; and if he caught sight of me at a distance his face would
get distorted with rage and he would make for me with his hand
raised. I always ran away from him, and always felt terrified that
he would catch me some time unawares. The face I always see now is
his face when he was in a rage.’