Freud - Complete Works (242 page)

   The disgust which Dora felt on
that occasion did not become a permanent symptom, and even at the
time of the treatment it was only, as it were, potentially present.
She was a poor eater and confessed to some disinclination for food.
On the other hand, the scene had left another consequence behind it
in the shape of a sensory hallucination which occurred from time to
time and even made its appearance while she was telling me her
story. She declared that she could still feel upon the upper part
of her body the pressure of Herr K.’s embrace. In accordance
with certain rules of symptom-formation which I have come to know,
and at the same time taking into account certain other of the
patient’s peculiarities, which were otherwise inexplicable, -
such as her unwillingness to walk past any man whom she saw engaged
in eager or affectionate conversation with a lady, - I have formed
in my own mind the following reconstruction of the scene. I believe
that during the man’s passionate embrace she felt not merely
his kiss upon her lips but also the pressure of his erect member
against her body. This perception was revolting to her; it was
dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent
sensation of pressure upon her thorax, which in turn derived an
excessive intensity from its repressed source. Once more,
therefore, we find a displacement from the lower part of the body
to the upper.³ On the other hand, the compulsive piece of
behaviour which I have mentioned was formed as though it were
derived from the undistorted recollection of the scene: she did not
like walking past any man who she thought was in a state of sexual
excitement, because she wanted to avoid seeing for a second time
the somatic sign which accompanies it.

  
¹
Our appreciation of these circumstances
will be facilitated when more light has been thrown upon
them.

  
²
The causes of Dora’s disgust at the
kiss were certainly not adventitious, for in that case she could
not have failed to remember and mention them. I happen to know Herr
K., for he was the same person who had visited me with the
patient’s father, and he was still quite young and of
prepossessing appearance.

  
³
The occurrence of displacements of this
kind has not been assumed for the purpose of this single
explanation; the assumption has proved indispensable for the
explanation of a large class of symptoms. Since treating Dora I
have come across another instance of an embrace (this time without
a kiss) causing a fright. It was a case of a young woman who had
previously been devotedly fond of the man she was engaged to, but
had suddenly begun to feel a coldness towards him, accompanied by
severe depression, and on that account came to me for treatment.
There was no difficulty in tracing the fright back to an erection
on the man’s part, which she had perceived but had dismissed
from her consciousness.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1370

   It is worth remarking that we
have here three symptoms - the disgust, the sensation of pressure
on the upper part of the body, and the avoidance of men engaged in
affectionate conversation - all of them derived from a single
experience, and that it is only by taking into account the
interrelation of these three phenomena that we can understand the
way in which the formation of the symptoms came about. The disgust
is the symptom of repression in the erotogenic oral zone, which, as
we shall hear, had been over-indulged in Dora’s infancy by
the habit of sensual sucking. The pressure of the erect member
probably led to an analogous change in the corresponding female
organ, the clitoris; and the excitation of this second erotogenic
zone was referred by a process of displacement to the simultaneous
pressure against the thorax and became fixed there. Her avoidance
of men who might possibly be in a state of sexual excitement
follows the mechanism of a phobia, its purpose being to safeguard
her against any revival of the repressed perception.

   In order to show that such a
supplement to the story was possible, I questioned the patient very
cautiously as to whether she knew anything of the physical signs of
excitement in a man’ body. Her answer, as touching the
present, was ‘Yes’, but, as touching the time of the
episode, ‘I think not’. From the very beginning I took
the greatest pains with this patient not to introduce her to any
fresh facts in the region of sexual knowledge; and I did this, not
from any conscientious motives, but because I was anxious to
subject my assumptions to a rigorous test in this case.
Accordingly, I did not call a thing by its name until her allusions
to it had become so unambiguous that there seemed very slight risk
in translating them into direct speech. Her answer was always
prompt and frank: she knew about it already. But the question of
where
her knowledge came from was a riddle which her
memories were unable to solve. She had forgotten the source of all
her information on this subject.¹

   If I may suppose that the scene
of the kiss took place in this way, I can arrive at the following
derivation for the feelings of disgust.² Such feelings seem
originally to be a reaction to the smell (and afterwards also to
the sight) of excrement. But the genitals can act as a reminder of
the excretory functions; and this applies especially to the male
member, for that organ performs the function of micturition as well
as the sexual function. Indeed, the function of micturition is the
earlier known of the two, and the
only
one known during the
pre-sexual period. Thus it happens that disgust becomes one of the
means of affective expression in the sphere of sexual life. The
Early Christian Father’s ‘
inter urinas et faeces
nascimur
’ clings to sexual life and cannot be detached
from it in spite of every effort at idealization. I should like,
however, expressly to emphasize my opinion that the problem is not
solved by the mere pointing out of this path of association. The
fact that this association
can
be called up does not show
that it actually
will
be called up. And indeed in normal
circumstances it will not be. A knowledge of the paths does not
render less necessary a knowledge of the forces which travel along
them.³

  
¹
See the second dream .

  
²
Here, as in all similar cases, the reader
must be prepared to be met not by one but by several causes - by
overdetermination
.

  
³
All these discussions contain much that is
typical and valid for hysteria in general. The subject of erection
solves some of the most interesting hysterical symptoms. The
attention that women pay to the outlines of men’s genitals as
seen through their clothing becomes, when it has been repressed, a
source of the very frequent cases of avoiding company and of
dreading society. - It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the
pathogenic significance of the comprehensive tie uniting the sexual
and the excremental, a tie which is at the basis of a very large
number of hysterical phobias.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1371

   I did not find it easy, however,
to direct the patient’s attention to her relations with Herr
K. She declared that she had done with him. The uppermost layer of
all her associations during the sessions, and everything of which
she was easily conscious and of which she remembered having been
conscious the day before, was always connected with her father. It
was quite true that she could not forgive her father for continuing
his relations with Herr K. and more particularly with Frau K. But
she viewed those relations in a very different light from that in
which her father wished them to appear. In her mind there was no
doubt that what bound her father to this young and beautiful woman
was a common love-affair. Nothing that could help to confirm this
view had escaped her perception, which in this connection was
pitilessly sharp;
here there were no gaps to be found in her
memory
. Their acquaintance with the K.’s had begun before
her father’s serious illness; but it had not become intimate
until the young woman had officially taken on the position of nurse
during that illness, while Dora’s mother had kept away from
the sick-room. During the first summer holidays after his recovery
things had happened which must have opened everyone’s eyes to
the true character of this ‘friendship’. The two
families had taken a suite of rooms in common at the hotel. One day
Frau K. had announced that she could not keep the bedroom which she
had up till then shared with one of her children. A few days later
Dora’s father had given up his bedroom, and they had both
moved into new rooms - the end rooms, which were only separated by
the passage, while the rooms they had given up had not offered any
such security against interruption. Later on, whenever she had
reproached her father about Frau K., he had been in the habit of
saying that he could not understand her hostility and that, on the
contrary, his children had every reason for being grateful to Frau
K. Her mother, whom she had asked for an explanation of this
mysterious remark, had told her that her father had been so unhappy
at that time that he had made up his mind to go into the wood and
kill himself, and that Frau K., suspecting as much, had gone after
him and had persuaded him by her entreaties to preserve his life
for the sake of his family. Of course, Dora went on, she herself
did not believe this story; no doubt the two of them had been seen
together in the wood, and her father had thereupon invented this
fairy tale of his suicide so as to account for their
rendezvous.¹

   When they had returned to B--,
her father had visited Frau K. every day at definite hours, while
her husband was at his business. Everybody had talked about it and
had questioned her about it pointedly. Herr K. himself had often
complained bitterly to her mother, though he had spared her herself
any allusions to the subject - which she seemed to attribute to
delicacy of feeling on his part. When they had all gone for walks
together, her father and Frau K. had always known how to manage
things so as to be alone with each other. There could be no doubt
that she had taken money from him, for she spent more than she
could possibly have afforded out of her own purse or her
husband’s. Dora added that her father had begun to make
handsome presents to Frau K., and in order to make these less
conspicuous had at the same time become especially liberal towards
her mother and herself. And, while previously Frau K. had been an
invalid and had even been obliged to spend months in a sanatorium
for nervous disorders because she had been unable to walk, she had
now become a healthy and lively woman.

  
¹
This is the point of connection with her
own pretence at suicide, which may thus be regarded as the
expression of a longing for a love of the same kind.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1372

   Even after they had left B-- for
the manufacturing town, these relations, already of many
years’ standing, had been continued. From time to time her
father used to declare that he could not endure the rawness of the
climate, and that he must do something for himself; he would begin
to cough and complain, until suddenly he would start off to B--,
and from there write the most cheerful letters home. All these
illnesses had only been pretexts for seeing his friend again. Then
one day it had been decided that they were to move to Vienna and
Dora began to suspect a hidden connection. And sure enough, they
had scarcely been three weeks in Vienna when she heard that the
K.’s had moved there as well. They were in Vienna, so she
told me, at that very moment, and she frequently met her father
with Frau K. in the street. She also met Herr K. very often, and he
always used to turn round and look after her; and once when he had
met her out by herself he had followed her for a long way, so as to
make sure where she was going and whether she might not have a
rendezvous.

   On one occasion during the course
of the treatment her father again felt worse, and went off to B--
for several weeks; and the sharp-sighted Dora had soon unearthed
the fact that Frau K. had started off to the same place on a visit
to her relatives there. It was at this time that Dora’s
criticisms of her father were the most frequent: he was insincere,
he had a strain of falseness in his character, he only thought of
his own enjoyment, and he had a gift for seeing things in the light
which suited him best.

   I could not in general dispute
Dora’s characterization of her father; and there was one
particular respect in which it was easy to see that her reproaches
were justified. When she was feeling embittered she used to be
overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as
the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and
his wife; and her rage at her father’s making such a use of
her was visible behind her affection for him. At other times she
was quite well aware that she had been guilty of exaggeration in
talking like this. The two men had of course never made a formal
agreement in which she was treated as an object for barter; her
father in particular would have been horrified at any such
suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a
dilemma by falsifying their judgement upon one of the conflicting
alternatives. If it had been pointed out to him that there might be
danger for a growing girl in the constant and unsupervised
companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife,
he would have been certain to answer that he could rely upon his
daughter, that a man like K. could never be dangerous to her, and
that his friend was himself incapable of such intentions, or that
Dora was still a child and was treated as a child by K. But as a
matter of fact things were in a position in which each of the two
men avoided drawing any conclusions from the other’s
behaviour which would have been awkward for his own plans. It was
possible for Herr K. to send Dora flowers every day for a whole
year while he was in the neighbourhood, to take every opportunity
of giving her valuable presents, and to spend all his spare time in
her company, without her parents noticing anything in his behaviour
that was characteristic of love-making.