Freud - Complete Works (246 page)

   The interpretation we have just
been discussing of Dora’s throat symptoms may also give rise
to a further remark. It may be asked how this sexual situation
imagined by her can be compatible with our other explanation of the
symptoms. That explanation, it will be remembered, was to the
effect that the coming and going of the symptoms reflected the
presence and absence of the man she was in love with, and, as
regards his wife’s behaviour, expressed the following
thought: ‘If
I
were his wife, I should love him in
quite a different way; I should be ill (from longing, let us say)
when he was away, and well (from joy) when he was home
again.’ To this objection I must reply that my experience in
the clearing-up of hysterical symptoms has shown that it is not
necessary for the various meanings of a symptom to be compatible
with one another, that is, to fit together into a connected whole.
It is enough that the unity should be constituted by the
subject-matter which has given rise to all the various phantasies.
In the present case, moreover, compatibility even of the first kind
is not out of the question. One of the two meanings is related more
to the cough, and the other to the aphonia and the periodicity of
the disorder. A closer analysis would probably have disclosed a far
greater number of mental elements in relation to the details of the
illness.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1390

   We have already learnt that it
quite regularly happens that a single symptom corresponds to
several meanings
simultaneously
. We may now add that it can
express several meanings
in succession
. In the course of
years a symptom can change its meaning or its chief meaning, or the
leading role can pass from one meaning to another. It is as though
there were a conservative trait in the character of neuroses which
ensures that a symptom that has once been formed shall if possible
be retained, even though the unconscious thought to which it gave
expression has lost its meaning . Moreover, there is no difficulty
in explaining this tendency towards the retention of a symptom upon
a mechanical basis. The production of a symptom of this kind is so
difficult, the translation of a purely psychical excitation into
physical terms - the process which I have called
‘conversion’ - depends on the concurrence of so many
favourable conditions, the somatic compliance necessary for
conversion is so seldom forthcoming, that an impulsion towards the
discharge of an unconscious excitation will so far as possible make
use of any channel for discharge which may already be in existence.
It appears to be far more difficult to create a fresh conversion
than to form paths of association between a new thought which is in
need of discharge and the old one which is no longer in need of it.
The current flows along these paths from the new source of
excitation to the old point of discharge - pouring into the
symptom, in the words of the Gospel, like new wine into an old
bottle. These remarks would make it seem that the somatic side of a
hysterical symptom is the more stable of the two and the harder to
replace, while the psychical side is a variable element for which a
substitute can more easily be found. Yet we should not try to infer
anything from this comparison as regards the relative importance of
the two elements. From the point of view of mental therapeutics the
mental side must always be the more significant.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1391

   Dora’s incessant repetition
of the same thoughts about her father’s relations with Frau
K. made it possible to derive still further important material from
the analysis.

   A train of thought such as this
may be described as excessively intense, or better
reinforced
, or ‘supervalent’
[‘
überwertig
’] in Wernicke’s sense.
It shows its pathological character in spite of its apparently
reasonable content, by the single peculiarity that no amount of
conscious and voluntary effort of thought on the patient’s
part is able to dissipate or remove it. A normal train of thought,
however intense it may be, can eventually be disposed of. Dora felt
quite rightly that her thoughts about her father required to be
judged in a special way. ‘I can think of nothing else’,
she complained again and again. ‘I know my brother says we
children have no right to criticize this behaviour of
Father’s. He declares that we ought not to trouble ourselves
about it, and ought even to be glad, perhaps, that he has found a
woman he can love, since Mother understands him so little. I can
quite see that, and I should like to think the same as my brother,
but I can’t. I can’t forgive him for
it.’¹

   Now what is one to do in the face
of a supervalent thought like this, after one has heard what its
conscious grounds are and listened to the ineffectual protests made
against it? Reflection will suggest that
this excessively
intense train of thought must owe its reinforcement to the
unconscious
. It cannot be resolved by any effort of thought,
either because it itself reaches with its root down into
unconscious, repressed material, or because another unconscious
thought lies concealed behind it. In the latter case, the concealed
thought is usually the direct contrary of the supervalent one.
Contrary thoughts are always closely connected with each other and
are often paired off in such a way that
the one thought is
excessively intensely conscious while its counterpart is repressed
and unconscious
. This relation between the two thoughts is an
effect of the process of repression. For repression is often
achieved by means of an excessive reinforcement of the thought
contrary to the one which is to be repressed. This process I call
reactive
reinforcement, and the thought which asserts itself
with excessive intensity in consciousness and (in the same way as a
prejudice) cannot be removed I call a
reactive thought
. The
two thoughts then act towards each other much like the two needles
of an astatic galvanometer. The reactive thought keeps the
objectionable one under repression by means of a certain surplus of
intensity; but for that reason it itself is ‘damped’
and proof against conscious efforts of thought. So that the way to
deprive the excessively intense thought of its reinforcement is by
bringing its repressed contrary into consciousness.

  
¹
A supervalent thought of this kind is often
the only symptom, beyond deep depression, of a pathological
condition which is usually described as ‘melancholia’,
but which can be cleared up by psycho-analysis like a
hysteria.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1392

   We must also be prepared to meet
with instances in which the supervalence of a thought is due not to
the presence of one only of these two causes but to a concurrence
of both of them. Other complications, too, may arise, but they can
easily be fitted into the general scheme.

   Let us now apply our theory to
the instance provided by Dora’s case. We will begin with the
first hypothesis, namely, that her preoccupation with her
father’s relations to Frau K, owed its obsessive character to
the fact that its root was unknown to her and lay in the
unconscious. It is not difficult to divine the nature of that root
from her circumstances and her conduct. Her behaviour obviously
went far beyond what would have been appropriate to filial concern.
She felt and acted more like a jealous wife - in a way which would
have been comprehensible in her mother. By her ultimatum to her
father (‘either her or me’), by the scenes she used to
make, by the suicidal intentions she allowed to transpire, - by all
this she was clearly putting herself in her mother’s place.
If we have rightly guessed the nature of the imaginary sexual
situation which underlay her cough, in that phantasy she must have
been putting herself in Frau K.’s place. She was therefore
identifying herself both with the woman her father had once loved
and with the woman he loved now. The inference is obvious that her
affection for her father was a much stronger one than she knew or
than she would have cared to admit: in fact, that she was in love
with him.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1393

   I have learnt to look upon
unconscious love relations like this (which are marked by their
abnormal consequences) - between a father and a daughter, or
between a mother and a son - as a revival of germs of feeling in
infancy. I have shown at length elsewhere¹ at what an early
age sexual attraction makes itself felt between parents and
children, and I have explained that the legend of Oedipus is
probably to be regarded as a poetical rendering of what is typical
in these relations. Distinct traces are probably to be found in
most people of an early partiality of this kind - on the part of a
daughter for her father, or on the part of a son for his mother;
but it must be assumed to be more intense from the very first in
the case of those children whose constitution marks them down for a
neurosis, who develop prematurely and have a craving for love. At
this point certain other influences, which need not be discussed
here, come into play, and lead to a fixation of this rudimentary
feeling of love or to a reinforcement of it; so that it turns into
something (either while the child is still young or not until it
has reached the age of puberty) which must be put on a par with a
sexual inclination and which, like the latter, has the forces of
the libido at its command.² The nature of her disposition had
always drawn her towards her father, and his numerous illnesses
were bound to have increased her affection for him. In some of
these illnesses he would allow no one but her to discharge the
lighter duties of nursing. He had been so proud of the early growth
of her intelligence that he had made her his confidante while she
was still a child. It was really she and not her mother whom Frau
K.’s appearance had driven out of more than one position.

  
¹
In my
Interpretation of Dreams
,
1900
a
, and in the third of my
Three Essays
,
1905
d
.

  
²
The decisive factor in this connection is
no doubt the early appearance of true genital sensations, either
spontaneously or as a result of seduction or masturbation. (See
below.)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1394

   When I told Dora that I could not
avoid supposing that her affection for her father must at a very
early moment have amounted to her being completely in love with
him, she of course gave me her usual reply: ‘I don’t
remember that.’ But she immediately went on to tell me
something analogous about a seven-year-old girl who was her cousin
(on her mother’s side) and in whom she often thought she saw
a kind of reflection of her own childhood. This little girl had
(not for the first time) been the witness of a heated dispute
between her parents, and, when Dora happened to come in on a visit
soon afterwards, whispered in her ear: ‘You can’t think
how I hate that person!’ (pointing to her mother), ‘and
when she’s dead I shall marry Daddy.’ I am in the habit
of regarding associations such as this, which bring forward
something that agrees with the content of an assertion of mine, as
a confirmation from the unconscious of what I have said. No other
kind of ‘Yes’ can be extracted from the unconscious;
there is no such thing at all as an unconscious
‘No’.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1923:] There is
another very remarkable and entirely trustworthy form of
confirmation from the unconscious, which I had not recognized at
the time this was written: namely, an exclamation on the part of
the patient of ‘I didn’t think that’, or ‘I
didn’t think of that’. This can be translated
point-blank into: ‘Yes, I was unconscious of
that.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1395

   For years on end she had given no
expression to this passion for her father. On the contrary, she had
for a long time been on the closest terms with the woman who had
supplanted her with her father, and she had actually, as we know
from her self-reproaches, facilitated this woman’s relations
with her father. Her own love for her father had therefore been
recently revived; and, if so, the question arises to what end this
had happened. Clearly as a reactive symptom, so as to suppress
something else - something, that is, that still exercised power in
the unconscious. Considering how things stood, I could not help
supposing in the first instance that what was suppressed in this
manner was her love of Herr K. I could not avoid the assumption
that she was still in love with him, but that, for unknown reasons,
since the scene by the lake her love had aroused in her violent
feelings of opposition, and that the girl had brought forward and
reinforced her old affection for her father in order to avoid and
further necessity for paying conscious attention to the love which
she had felt in the first years of her girlhood and which had now
become distressing to her. In this way I gained an insight into a
conflict which was well calculated to unhinge the girl’s
mind. On the one hand she was filled with regret at having rejected
the man’s proposal, and with longing for his company and all
the little signs of his affection; while on the other hand these
feelings of tenderness and longing were combated by powerful
forces, amongst which her pride was one of the most obvious. Thus
she had succeeded in persuading herself that she had done with Herr
K. - that was the advantage she derived from this typical process
of repression; and yet she was obliged to summon up her infantile
affection for her father and to exaggerate it, in order to protect
herself against the feelings of love which were constantly pressing
forward into consciousness. The further fact that she was almost
incessantly a prey to the most embittered jealousy seemed to admit
of still another determination.¹