Freud - Complete Works by Sigmund Freud Page B

noticed it, she had assured him that it was
‘only this once’. She felt so very sorry on my account
that she should have had to betray this relic of her former
nervousness. I have more than once had occasion to notice during
these last few days how hard she is on herself, how liable she is
to blame herself severely for the least signs of neglect if the
towels for the massage are not in their usual place or if the
newspaper for me to read when she is asleep is not instantly ready
to hand. After the removal of the first and most superficial layer
of tormenting recollections, her morally oversensitive personality,
with its tendency to self-depreciation, has come into view. Both in
her waking state and under hypnosis, I duly told her (what amounted
to the old legal tag ‘ de minimis non curat lex ’)
that there is a whole multitude of indifferent, small things lying
between what is good and what is evil - things about which no one
need reproach himself. She did not take in my lesson, I fancy, any
more than would an ascetic mediaeval monk, who sees the finger of
God or a temptation of the Devil in every trivial event of his life
and who is incapable of picturing the world even for a brief moment
or in its smallest corner as being without reference to
himself.
       In her hypnosis she brought up
some further horrifying images (in Abbazia, for instance, she saw
bloody heads on every wave of the sea). I made her repeat the
lessons I had given her while she was awake.
     
       ¹ At the time I wrote this I was inclined to
look for a psychical origin for all symptoms in cases of
hysteria. I should now explain this sexually abstinent
woman’s tendency to anxiety as being due to neurosis (i.e. anxiety neurosis).
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    64
     
     
       May 15 . - She had slept
till 8.30 a.m. but had become restless towards morning, and
received me with some slight signs of her tic , clacking and
speech-inhibition. ‘I’m frightened to death,’ she
said once more. In reply to a question she told me that the Pension
in which her children were staying was on the fourth floor of a
building and reached by a lift. She had insisted yesterday that the
children should make use of the lift for coming down as well as
going up, and was now reproaching herself about this, because the
lift was not entirely to be trusted. The owner of the Pension had
said so himself. Had I heard, she asked, the story of the Countess
Sch. who had been killed in Rome in an accident of that kind? I
happen to be acquainted with the Pension and I know that the lift
is the private property of the owner of the Pension; it does not
seem to me very likely that this man, who makes a special point of
the lift in an advertisement, would himself have warned anyone
against using it. It seemed to me that we had here one of the
paramnesias that are brought about by anxiety. I told her my view
and succeeded without any difficulty in getting her herself to
laugh at the improbability of her fears. For that very reason I
could not believe that this was the cause of her anxiety and
determined to put the question to her hypnotic consciousness.
During massage, which I resumed to-day after a few days’
interval, she told me a loosely connected string of anecdotes,
which may have been true - about a toad which was found in a
cellar, an eccentric mother who looked after her idiot child in a
strange fashion, a woman who was shut up in an asylum because she
had melancholia - and which showed the kind of recollections that
passed through her head when she was in a disquieted frame of mind.
When she had got these stories out she became very cheerful. She
described her life on her estate and her contacts with prominent
men in German Russia and North Germany; and I really found it
extremely hard to reconcile activities of this kind with the
picture of such a severely neurotic woman.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    65
     
       I therefore asked her in hypnosis
why she was so restless