Freud - Complete Works (552 page)

   A nineteen-year-old girl, well
developed and gifted, was the only child of parents to whom she was
superior in education and intellectual liveliness. As a child she
had been wild and high spirited, and in the course of the last few
years had changed, without any visible cause, into a neurotic. She
was very irritable, particularly towards her mother, always
dissatisfied and depressed, and inclined to indecisiveness and
doubt; finally she admitted that she was no longer able to walk by
herself across squares or along comparatively wide streets. We will
not concern ourselves much with her complicated illness, which
called for at least two diagnoses - agoraphobia and obsessional
neurosis - but will dwell only on the fact that she also developed
a sleep-ceremonial, with which she tormented her parents. In a
certain sense it may be said that every normal person has his
sleep-ceremonial or that he has established certain necessary
conditions the non-fulfilment of which interferes with his going to
sleep; he has imposed certain forms on the transition from the
waking to the sleeping state and repeats them in the same manner
every evening. But everything that a healthy person requires as a
necessary condition for sleep can be understood rationally, and if
external circumstances call for a change he will comply easily and
without waste of time. A pathological ceremonial, however, is
unyielding and insists on being carried through, even at the cost
of great sacrifices; it too is screened by having a rational basis
and at a superficial glance seems to diverge from the normal only
by a certain exaggerated meticulousness. On closer examination,
nevertheless, we can see that the screen is insufficient, that the
ceremonial comprises some stipulations which go far beyond its
rational basis and others which positively run counter to it. Our
present patient put forward as a pretext for her nightly
precautions that she needed quiet in order to sleep and must
exclude every source of noise. With that end in view she did two
kinds of things. The big clock in her room was stopped, all the
other clocks or watches in the room were removed, and her tiny
wrist-watch was not allowed even to be inside her bedside table.
Flower-pots and vases were collected on the writing-table so that
they might not fall over in the night and break, and disturb her in
her sleep. She was aware that these measures could find only an
ostensible
justification in the rule in favour of quiet: the
ticking of the little watch would not have been audible even if it
had been left lying on the top of the bedside table, and we have
all had experience of the fact that the regular ticking of a
pendulum-clock never disturbs sleep but acts, rather, as a
soporific. She admitted too that her fear that flower-pots and
vases, if they were left in their places, might fall over and break
of their own accord lacked all plausibility. In the case of other
stipulations made by the ceremonial the need for quiet was dropped
as a basis. Indeed, the requirement that the door between her room
and her parents’ bedroom should stay half-open - the
fulfilment of which she ensured by placing various objects in the
open doorway - seemed on the contrary to act as a source of
disturbing noises. But the most important stipulations related to
the bed itself. The pillow at the top end of the bed must not touch
the wooden back of the bedstead. The small top pillow must lie on
this large pillow in one specific way only - namely, so as to form
a diamond shape. Her head had then to lie exactly along the long
diameter of the diamond. The eiderdown (or
‘
Duchent
’ as we call it in Austria) had to be
shaken before being laid on the bed so that its bottom end became
very thick; afterwards, however, she never failed to even out this
accumulation of feathers by pressing them apart.

   With your leave I will pass over
the remaining, often very trivial, details of the ceremonial; they
would teach us nothing new, and would lead us too far afield from
our aims. But you must not overlook the fact that all this was not
carried out smoothly. There was always an apprehension that things
might not have been done properly. Everything must be checked and
repeated, doubts assailed first one and then another of the safety
measures, and the result was that one or two hours were spent,
during which the girl herself could not sleep and would not allow
her intimidated parents to sleep either.

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   The analysis of these torments
did not proceed so simply as that of our earlier patient’s
obsessional action. I was obliged to give the girl hints and
propose interpretations, which were always rejected with a decided
‘no’ or accepted with contemptuous doubt. But after
this first reaction of rejection there followed a time during which
she occupied herself with the possibilities put before her,
collected associations to them, produced recollections and made
connections, until by her own work she had accepted all the
interpretations. In proportion as this happened, she relaxed the
performance of her obsessional measures, and even before the end of
the treatment she had given up the whole ceremonial. You must
understand, too, that the work of analysis as we carry it out
to-day quite excludes the systematic treatment of any individual
symptom till it has been entirely cleared up. We are, on the
contrary, obliged to keep on leaving any particular topic, in the
certain expectation of coming back to it again in other
connections. The interpretation of her symptoms which I am about to
give you is accordingly a synthesis of findings which were arrived
at, interrupted by other work, over a period of weeks and
months.

   Our patient gradually came to
learn that it was as symbols of the female genitals that clocks
were banished from her equipment for the night. Clocks and watches
- though elsewhere we have found other symbolic interpretations for
them - have arrived at a genital role owing to their relation to
periodic processes and equal intervals of time. A woman may boast
that her menstruation behaves with the regularity of clockwork. Our
patient’s anxiety, however, was directed in particular
against being disturbed in her sleep by the ticking of a clock. The
ticking of a clock may be compared with the knocking or throbbing
in the clitoris during sexual excitement. She had in fact been
repeatedly woken from her sleep by this sensation, which had now
become distressing to her; and she gave expression to this fear of
an erection in the rule that all clocks and watches that were going
should be removed from her neighbourhood at night. Flower-pots and
vases, like all vessels, are also female symbols. Taking
precautions against their falling and being broken at night was
thus not without its good sense. We know the widespread custom of
breaking a vessel or plate at betrothal ceremonies. Each man
present gets hold of a fragment, and we may regard this as a sign
of his resigning the claims he had upon the bride in virtue of a
marriage-regulation dating from before the establishment of
monogamy. In connection with this part of her ceremonial the girl
produced a recollection and several associations. Once when she was
a child she had fallen down while she was carrying a glass or china
vase and had cut her finger and bled profusely. When she grew up
and came to know the facts about sexual intercourse she formed an
anxious idea that on her wedding-night she would not bleed and
would thus fail to show that she was a virgin. Her precautions
against vases being broken thus meant a repudiation of the whole
complex concerned with virginity and bleeding at the first
intercourse - a repudiation equally of the fear of bleeding and of
the contrary fear of not bleeding. These precautions, which she
subsumed under her avoidance of noise, had only a remote connection
with it.

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   She found out the central meaning
of her ceremonial one day when she suddenly understood the meaning
of the rule that the pillow must not touch the back of the
bedstead. The pillow, she said, had always been a woman to her and
the upright wooden back a man. Thus she wanted - by magic, we must
interpolate - to keep the man and woman apart - that is, to
separate her parents from each other, not to allow them to have
sexual intercourse. In earlier years, before she had established
the ceremonial, she had tried to achieve the same aim in a more
direct way. She had simulated fear (or had exploited a tendency to
fear which was already present) in order that the connecting doors
between her parents’ bedroom and the nursery should not be
shut. This rule had, indeed, been retained in her present
ceremonial. In that way she gave herself the opportunity of
listening to her parents, but in making use of it she brought on an
insomnia which lasted for months. Not satisfied with disturbing her
parents by this means, she contrived to be allowed from time to
time to sleep in her parents’ bed between them. The
‘pillow’ and the ‘wooden back’ were thus
really unable to come together. Finally, when she was so big that
it became physically uncomfortable for her to find room in the bed
between her parents, she managed, by a conscious simulation of
anxiety, to arrange for her mother to exchange places with her for
the night and to leave her own place so that the patient could
sleep beside her father. This situation no doubt became the
starting-point of phantasies whose after-effect was to be seen in
the ceremonial.

   If a pillow was a woman, then the
shaking of the eiderdown till all the feathers were at the bottom
and caused a swelling there had a sense as well. It meant making a
woman pregnant; but she never failed to smooth away the pregnancy
again, for she had for years been afraid that her parents’
intercourse would result in another child and so present her with a
competitor. On the other hand, if the big pillow was a woman, the
mother, then the small top-pillow could only stand for the
daughter. Why did this pillow have to be placed diamond-wise and
her head precisely along its centre line? It was easy to re call to
her that this diamond shape is the inscription scribbled on every
wall to represent the open female genitals. If so, she herself was
playing the man and replacing the male organ by her head. (Cf. the
symbolism of beheading for castrating.)

   Wild thoughts, you will say, to
be running through an unmarried girl’s head. I admit that is
so. But you must not forget that I did not make these things but
only interpreted them. A sleep-ceremonial like this is a strange
thing too, and you will not fail to see how the ceremonial
corresponds to the phantasies which are revealed by the
interpretation. But I attach more importance to your noticing that
what was seen in the ceremonial was a precipitate not of a
single
phantasy but of a number of them, though they had a
nodal point somewhere, and, further, that the rules laid down by
the ceremonial reproduced the patient’s sexual wishes at one
point positively and at another negatively - in part they
represented them, but in part they served as a defence against
them.

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3348

   More could be made, too, of the
analysis of this ceremonial if it could be properly linked up with
the patient’s other symptoms. But our path does not lead in
that direction. You must be content with a hint that the girl was
in the grip of an erotic attachment to her father whose beginnings
went back to her childhood. Perhaps that was why she behaved in
such an unfriendly way to her mother. Nor can we overlook the fact
that the analysis of this symptom has once again taken us back to a
patient’s sexual life. We shall perhaps be less surprised at
this the more often we gain an insight into the sense and intention
of neurotic symptoms.

   I have shown you, then, on the
basis of two chosen examples, that neurotic symptoms have a sense,
like parapraxes and dreams, and that they have an intimate
connection with the patient’s experiences. Can I expect you
to believe this extremely important thesis on the evidence of two
examples? No. But can you require me to go on giving you further
examples till you declare yourselves convinced? No, once more. For,
in view of the detailed fashion in which I deal with each single
case, I should have to devote a five-hour course of lectures to
settling this one point in the theory of the neuroses. So I must be
content with having given you a trial proof of my assertion and,
for the rest, I refer you to the reports given in the literature of
the subject - to the classical interpretations of symptoms in
Breuer’s first case (of hysteria), to the striking light
thrown upon the most obscure symptoms of what is known as dementia
praecox by C. G. Jung, at a time when he was merely a
psycho-analyst and had not yet aspired to be a prophet, and all the
other papers that have since than filled our periodicals. There has
been no lack of investigations precisely on these lines. The
analysis, interpretation and translation of neurotic symptoms
proved so attractive to psycho-analysts that for a time they
neglected the other problems of neurosis.

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3349

   If any of you undertakes
exertions of this kind, he will certainly gain a powerful
impression of the wealth of evidential material. But he will also
come up against a difficulty. The sense of a symptom lies, as we
have found, in some connection with the patient’s experience.
The more individual is the form of the symptom the more reason we
shall have for expecting to be able to establish this connection.
The task is then simply to discover, in respect to a senseless idea
and a pointless action, the past situation in which the idea was
justified and the action served a purpose. The obsessional action
of our patient who ran to the table and rang for the housemaid is a
perfect model of this kind of symptom. But there are - and they are
very frequent symptoms of quite another character. They must be
described as ‘typical’ symptoms of an illness; they are
approximately the same in all cases, individual distinctions
disappear in them or at least shrink up to such an extent that it
is difficult to bring them into connection with the patients’
individual experience and to relate them to particular situations
they have experienced. Let us look once more at obsessional
neurosis. the sleep-ceremonial of our second patient already has
much that is typical about it, though at the same time it has
enough individual traits to make what I might call a
‘historical’ interpretation possible. But all these
obsessional patients have a tendency to repeat, to make their
performances rhythmical and to keep them isolated from other
actions. The majority of them wash too much. Patients who suffer
from agoraphobia (topophobia or fear of spaces), which we no longer
regard as obsessional neurosis but describe as ‘anxiety
hysteria’, often repeat the same features in their symptoms
with wearisome monotony: they are afraid of en closed spaces, of
large open squares, of lengthy roads and streets. They feel
protected if they are accompanied by an acquaintance or followed by
a vehicle, and so on. On this similar background, however,
different patients nevertheless display their individual
requirements - whims, one is inclined to say - which in some cases
contradict one another directly. One patient avoids only narrow
streets and another only wide ones; one can go out only if there
are few people in the street, another only if there are many. In
the same way, hysteria, in spite of its wealth of individual
traits, has a superfluity of common, typical symptoms, which seem
to resist any easy historical derivation. And we must not forget
that it is these typical symptoms, indeed, which give us our
bearings when we make our diagnosis. Suppose, in a case of
hysteria, we have really traced a typical symptom back to an
experience or a chain of similar experiences - a case of hysterical
vomiting, for instance, to a series of disgusting impressions -
then we are at a loss when the analysis in a similar case of
vomiting reveals a series of a quite different kind of ostensibly
effective experiences. It looks, then, as though for unknown
reasons hysterical patients are bound to produce vomiting and as
though the historical precipitating causes revealed by analysis
were only pretexts which, if they happen to be there, are exploited
by this internal necessity.