Freud - Complete Works by Sigmund Freud Page A

Yesterday
evening it had suddenly occurred to her why the small animals she
saw grew so enormous. It happened to her for the first time at D--
during a theatrical performance in which a huge lizard appeared on
the stage. This memory had tormented her a great deal yesterday as
well.¹
     
       ¹ The visual memory of the big lizard had no
doubt only attained its great importance owing to its coinciding in
time with a powerful affect which she must have experienced during
the theatrical performance. In treating the present patient, as I
have already confessed, I was often content to receive the most
superficial explanations. In this instance, too, I failed to make
any further investigation. - We shall be reminded, moreover, of
hysterical macropsia. Frau Emmy was extremely short-sighted and
astigmatic, and her hallucinations may often have been provoked by
the indistinctness of her visual perceptions.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    62
     
       The reason for the re-appearance
of the clacking was that yesterday she had abdominal pains and had
tried not to show it by groaning. She knew nothing of the true
precipitating cause of the clacking (see above ). She remembered, too, that I had
instructed her to discover the origin of her gastric pains. She did
not know it, however, and asked me to help her. I asked whether,
perhaps, on some occasion after a great excitement, she had forced
herself to eat. She confirmed this. After her husband’s death
she had for a long time lost her appetite completely and had only
eaten from a sense of duty; and her gastric pains had in fact begun
at that time. I then removed her gastric pains by stroking her a
few times across the epigastrium. She then began of her own accord
to talk about the things that had most affected her. ‘I have
told you,’ she said, ‘that I was not fond of the child.
But I ought to add that one could not have guessed it from my
behaviour. I did everything that was necessary. Even now I reproach
myself for being fonder of the elder one.’
     
       May 14 . - She was well and
cheerful and had slept till 7.30 this morning. She only complained
of slight pains in the radial region of her hand and in her head
and face. What she tells me before the hypnosis becomes more and
more significant. To-day she had scarcely anything dreadful to
produce. She complained of pains and loss of sensation in her right
leg. She told me that she had had an attack of abdominal
inflammation in 1871; when she had hardly recovered from this, she
had nursed her sick brother, and it was then that the pains first
came on. They had even led to a temporary paralysis of her right
leg.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    63
     
       During the hypnosis I asked her
whether it would now be possible for her to take part in social
life or whether she was still too much afraid. She said it was
still disagreeable to have anyone standing behind her or just
beside her. In this connection she told me of some more occasions
on which she had been disagreeably surprised by someone suddenly
appearing. Once, for instance, when she had been going for a walk
with her daughters on the island of Rügen, two
suspicious-looking individuals had come out from some bushes and
insulted them. In Abbazia, while she was out for a walk one
evening, a beggar had suddenly emerged from behind a rock and had
knelt down in front of her. It seems that he was a harmless
lunatic. Lastly, she told me of how her isolated country house had
been broken into at night, which had very much alarmed her. It is
easy to see, however, that the essential origin of this fear of
people was the persecution to which she had been subjected after
her husband’s death.¹
       Evening . - Though she
appeared to be in high spirits, she greeted me with the
exclamation: ‘I’m frightened to death; oh, I can hardly
tell you, I hate myself!’ I learned at last that she had had
a visit from Dr. Breuer and that on his appearance she had given a
start of alarm. As he