Autobiographical note 80 страница

At first she would not remember ever having read anything in an encyclopaedia; but she then admitted that a recollection of an occasion of the kind did occur to her, though it was of an innocent enough nature. At the time when the aunt she was so fond of had been so seriously ill and it had already been settled that Dora was to go to Vienna, a letter had come from another uncle, to say that they could not go to Vienna, as a boy of his, a cousin of Dora’s therefore, had fallen dangerously ill with appendicitis. Dora had thereupon looked up in the encyclopaedia to see what the symptoms of appendicitis were. From what she had then read she still recollected the characteristic localization of the abdominal pain.

¹ On another occasion, instead of ‘calmly’ she said ‘not the least sadly’ (p. 1430 n.) - I can quote this dream as fresh evidence for the correctness of an assertion made in my Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter VII, Section A; p. 953) to the effect that those pieces of a dream which are at first forgotten and are only subsequently remembered are invariably the most important from the point of view of understanding the dream. In the same place I went on to the conclusion that the forgetting of dreams must also be explained as an effect of endopsychic resistance.

I then remembered that shortly after her aunt’s death Dora had had an attack of what had been alleged to be appendicitis. Up till then I had not ventured to count that illness among her hysterical productions. She told me that during the first few days she had had high fever and had felt the pain in her abdomen that she had read about in the encyclopaedia. She had been given cold fomentations but had not been able to bear them. On the second day her period had set in, accompanied by violent pains. (Since her health had been bad, the periods had been very irregular.) At that time she used to suffer continually from constipation.

It was not really possible to regard this state as a purely hysterical one. Although hysterical fever does undoubtedly occur, yet it seemed too arbitrary to put down the fever accompanying this questionable illness to hysteria instead of to some organic cause operative at the time. I was on the point of abandoning the track, when she herself helped me along it by producing her last addendum to the dream: she saw herself particularly distinctly going up the stairs.

I naturally required a special determinant for this. Dora objected that she would anyhow have had to go upstairs if she had wanted to get to her flat, which was on an upper floor. It was easy to brush aside this objection (which was probably not very seriously intended) by pointing out that if she had been able to travel in her dream from the unknown town to Vienna without making a railway journey she ought also to have been able to leave out a flight of stairs. She then proceeded to relate that after the appendicitis she had not been able to walk properly and had dragged her right foot. This state of things had continued for a long time, and on that account she had been particularly glad to avoid stairs. Even now her foot sometimes dragged. The doctors whom she had consulted at her father’s desire had been very much astonished at this most unusual after-effect of an appendicitis, especially as the abdominal pains had not recurred and did not in any way accompany the dragging of the foot.¹

¹ We must assume the existence of some somatic connection between the painful abdominal sensations known as ‘ovarian neuralgia’ and locomotor disturbances in the leg on the same side; and we must suppose that in Dora’s case the somatic connection had been given an interpretation of a particularly specialized sort, that is to say, that it had been overlaid with and brought into the service of a particular psychological meaning. The reader is referred to my analogous remarks in connection with the analysis of Dora’s symptom of coughing and with the relation between catarrh and loss of appetite.

Here, then, we have a true hysterical symptom. The fever may have been organically determined - perhaps by one of those very frequent attacks of influenza that are not localized in any particular part of the body. Nevertheless it was now established that the neurosis had seized upon this chance event and made use of it for an utterance of its own. Dora had therefore given herself an illness which she had read up about in the encyclopaedia, and she had punished herself for dipping into its pages. But she was forced to recognize that the punishment could not possibly apply to her reading the innocent article in question. It must have been inflicted as the result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.¹ It might still be possible, perhaps, to discover the nature of the subjects she had read about on that other occasion.

What, then, was the meaning of this condition, of this attempted simulation of a perityphlitis? The remainder of the disorder, the dragging of one leg, was entirely out of keeping with perityphlitis. It must, no doubt, fit in better with the secret and possibly sexual meaning of the clinical picture; and if it were elucidated might in its turn throw light on the meaning which we were in search of. I looked about for a method of approaching the puzzle. Periods of time had been mentioned in the dream; and time is assuredly never a matter of indifference in any biological event. I therefore asked Dora when this attack of appendicitis had taken place; whether it had been before or after the scene by the lake. Every difficulty was resolved at a single blow by her prompt reply: ‘Nine months later.’ The period of time is sufficiently characteristic. Her supposed attack of appendicitis had thus enabled the patient with the modest means at her disposal (the pains and the menstrual flow) to realize a phantasy of childbirth.² Dora was naturally aware of the significance of this period of time, and could not dispute the probability of her having, on the occasion under discussion, read up in the encyclopaedia about pregnancy and childbirth. But what was all this about her dragging her leg? I could now hazard a guess. That is how people walk when they have twisted a foot. So she had made a ‘false step’: which was true indeed if she could give birth to a child nine months after the scene by the lake. But there was still another requirement upon the fulfilment of which I had to insist. I am convinced that a symptom of this kind can only arise where it has an infantile prototype. All my experience hitherto has led me to hold firmly to the view that recollections derived from the impressions of later years do not possess sufficient force to enable them to establish themselves as symptoms. I scarcely dared hope that Dora would provide me with the material that I wanted from her childhood, for the fact is that I am not yet in a position to assert the general validity of this rule, much as I should like to be able to do so. But in this case there came an immediate confirmation of it. Yes, said Dora, once when she was a child she had twisted the same foot; she had slipped on one of the steps as she was going downstairs. The foot - and it was actually the same one that she afterwards dragged - had swelled up and had to be bandaged and she had had to lie up for some weeks. This had been a short time before the attack of nervous asthma in her eighth year.

¹ This is quite a typical example of the way in which symptoms arise from exciting causes which appear to be entirely unconnected with sexuality.

² I have already indicated that the majority of hysterical symptoms, when they have attained their full pitch of development, represent an imagined situation of sexual life - such as a scene of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, confinement, etc.9

The next thing to do was to turn to account our knowledge of the existence of this phantasy: ‘If it is true that you were delivered of a child nine months after the scene by the lake, and that you are going about to this very day carrying the consequences of your false step with you, then it follows that in your unconscious you must have regretted the upshot of the scene. In your unconscious thoughts, that is to say, you have made an emendation in it. The assumption that underlies your phantasy of childbirth is that on that occasion something took place,¹ that on that occasion you experienced and went through everything that you were in fact obliged to pick up later on from the encyclopaedia. So you see that your love for Herr K. did not come to an end with the scene, but that (as I maintained) it has persisted down to the present day - though it is true that you are unconscious of it.’ - And Dora disputed the fact no longer.²

¹ The phantasy of defloration is thus found to have an application to Herr K., and we begin to see why this part of the dream contained material taken from the scene by the lake - the refusal, two and a half hours, the wood, the invitation to L--.

² I may here add a few supplementary interpretations to those that have already been given: The ‘Madonna’ was obviously Dora herself; in the first place because of the ‘adorer’ who had sent her the pictures, in the second place because she had won Herr K.’s love chiefly by the motherliness she had shown towards his children, and lastly because she had had a child though she was still a girl (this being a direct allusion to the phantasy of childbirth). Moreover, the notion of the ‘Madonna’ is a favourite counter-idea in the mind of girls who feel themselves oppressed by imputations of sexual guilt, - which was the case with Dora. A first suspicion of this connection came to me while I was working as a physician at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University. I there came across a case of confusional insanity with hallucinations, in which the attack, which ran a rapid course, turned out to be a reaction to a reproach made against the patient by her fiancé. - If the analysis had been continued, Dora’s maternal longing for a child would probably have been revealed as an obscure though powerful motive in her behaviour. The numerous questions which she had been raising latterly seem to have been belated derivatives of questions inspired by the sexual curiosity which she had tried to gratify with the encyclopaedia. The subjects which she read up in it were presumably pregnancy, childbirth, virginity, and so on. - In reproducing the dream Dora had forgotten one of the questions which need to be inserted into the course of the second situation in the dream. This question could only be; ‘Does Herr -- live here?’ or ‘Where does Herr -- live?’ There must have been some reason for her having forgotten this apparently innocent question, especially as she need not have brought it into the dream at all. This reason, it seems to me, lay in her surname itself, which also denoted an object and in fact more than one kind of object, and which could therefore be regarded as an ‘ambiguous’ word. Unluckily I cannot give the name and show how well designed it was to indicate something ‘ambiguous’ and ‘improper’. This interpretation was supported by the discovery of a similar play upon words in another part of the dream, where the material was derived from Dora’s recollections of her aunt’s death (‘they have already gone to the cemetery’) and where there was similarly a play upon her aunt’s name. These improper words seemed to point to a second and oral source of information, since the encyclopaedia would not cover them. I should not have been surprised to hear that this source had been Frau K. herself, Dora’s calumniator. In that case she would have been the one person whom Dora generously spared, while she pursued the others with an almost malignant vindictiveness. Behind the almost limitless series of displacements which were thus brought to light, it was possible to divine the operation of a single simple factor - Dora’s deep-rooted homosexual love for Frau K.

The labour of elucidating the second dream had so far occupied two hours. At the end of the second session, when I expressed my satisfaction at the result, Dora replied in a depreciatory tone: ‘Why, has anything so very remarkable come out?’ These words prepared me for the advent of fresh revelations.

She opened the third session with these words: ‘Do you know that I am here for the last time to-day?’ - ‘How can I know, as you have said nothing to me about it?’ - ‘Yes. I made up my mind to put up with it till the New Year.¹ But I shall wait no longer than that to be cured.’ - ‘You know that you are free to stop the treatment at any time. But for to-day we will go on with our work. When did you come to this decision?’ - ‘A fortnight ago, I think.’ - ‘That sounds just like a maidservant or a governess - a fortnight’s notice.’ - ‘There was a governess who gave notice with the K.’s, when I was on my visit to them that time at L--, by the lake.’ - ‘Really? You have never told me about her. Tell me.’

‘Well, there was a young girl in the house, who was the children’s governess; and she behaved in the most extraordinary way to Herr K. She never said good morning to him, never answered his remarks, never handed him anything at table when he asked for it, and in short treated him like thin air. For that matter he was hardly any politer to her. A day or two before the scene by the lake, the girl took me aside and said she had something to tell me. She then told me that Herr K. had made advances to her at a time when his wife was away for several weeks; he had made violent love to her and had implored her to yield to his entreaties, saying that he got nothing from his wife, and so on.’ - ‘Why, those are the very words he used afterwards, when he made his proposal to you and you gave him the slap in his face’. - ‘Yes. She had given way to him, but after a little while he had ceased to care for her, and since then she hated him.’ - ‘And this governess had given notice?’ - ‘No. She meant to give notice. She told me that as soon as she felt she was thrown over she had told her parents what had happened. They were respectable people living in Germany somewhere. Her parents said that she must leave the house instantly; and, as she failed to do so, they wrote to her saying that they would have nothing more to do with her, and that she was never to come home again.’ - ‘And why had she not gone away?’ - ‘She said she meant to wait a little longer, to see if there might not be some change in Herr K. She could not bear living like that any more, she said, and if she saw no change she should give notice and go away.’ - ‘And what became of the girl?’ - ‘I only know that she went away.’ - ‘And she did not have a child as a result of the adventure? ‘ - ‘No.’

¹ It was December 31st.1

Here, therefore (and quite in accordance with the rules), was a piece of material information coming to light in the middle of the analysis and helping to solve problems which had previously been raised. I was able to say to Dora: ‘Now I know your motive for the slap in the face with which you answered Herr K.’s proposal. It was not that you were offended at his suggestions; you were actuated by jealousy and revenge. At the time when the governess was telling you her story you were still able to make use of your gift for putting on one side everything that is not agreeable to your feelings. But at the moment when Herr K. used the words "I get nothing out of my wife" - which were the same words he had used to the governess - fresh emotions were aroused in you and tipped the balance. "Does he dare", you said to yourself, "to treat me like a governess, like a servant?" Wounded pride added to jealousy and to the conscious motives of common sense - it was too much.¹ To prove to you how deeply impressed you were by the governess’s story, let me draw your attention to the repeated occasions upon which you have identified yourself with her both in your dream and in your conduct. You told your parents what happened - a fact which we have hitherto been unable to account for - just as the governess wrote and told her parents. You give me a fortnight’s notice, just like a governess. The letter in the dream which gave you leave to go home is the counterpart of the governess’s letter from her parents forbidding her to do so.’

¹ It is not a matter of indifference, perhaps, that Dora may have heard her father make the same complaint about his wife, just as I myself did from his own lips. She was perfectly well aware of its meaning.2

‘Then why did I not tell my parents at once?’

‘How much time did you allow to elapse? ‘

‘The scene took place on the last day of June; I told my mother about it on July 14th.’

‘Again a fortnight, then - the time characteristic for a person in service. Now I can answer your question. You understood the poor girl very well. She did not want to go away at once, because she still had hopes, because she expected that Herr K.’s affections would return to her again. So that must have been your motive too. You waited for that length of time so as to see whether he would repeat his proposals; if he had, you would have concluded that he was in earnest, and did not mean to play with you as he had done with the governess.’

‘A few days after I had left he sent me a picture post-card.’¹

‘Yes, but when after that nothing more came, you gave free rein to your feelings of revenge. I can even imagine that at that time you were still able to find room for a subsidiary intention, and thought that your accusation might be a means of inducing him to travel to the place where you were living. - ‘As he actually offered to do at first,’ Dora threw in. - ‘In that way your longing for him would have been appeased’ - here she nodded assent, a thing which I had not expected - ‘and he might have made you the amends you desired.’

‘What amends?’

‘The fact is, I am beginning to suspect that you took the affair with Herr K. much more seriously than you have been willing to admit so far. Had not the K.’s often talked of getting a divorce?’

‘Yes, certainly. At first she did not want to, on account of the children. And now she wants to, but he no longer does.’

¹ Here is the point of contact with the engineer, who was concealed behind the figure of Dora herself in the first situation in the dream.

‘May you not have thought that he wanted to get divorced from his wife so as to marry you? And that now he no longer wants to because he has no one to replace her? It is true that two years ago you were very young. But you told me yourself that your mother was engaged at seventeen and then waited two years for her husband. A daughter usually takes her mother’s love-story as her model. So you too wanted to wait for him, and you took it that he was only waiting till you were grown up enough to be his wife.¹ I imagine that this was a perfectly serious plan for the future in your eyes. You have not even got the right to assert that it was out of the question for Herr K. to have had any such intention; you have told me enough about him that points directly towards his having such an intention.² Nor does his behaviour at L-- contradict this view. After all, you did not let him finish his speech and do not know what he meant to say to you. Incidentally, the scheme would by no means have been so impracticable. Your father’s relations with Frau K.- and it was probably only for this reason that you lent them your support for so long - made it certain that her consent to a divorce could be obtained; and you can get anything you like out of your father. Indeed, if your temptation at L-- had had a different upshot, this would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned. And I think that is why you regretted the actual event so deeply and emended it in the phantasy which made its appearance in the shape of the appendicitis. So it must have been a bitter piece of disillusionment for you when the effect of your charges against Herr K. was not that he renewed his proposals but that he replied instead with denials and slanders. You will agree that nothing makes you so angry as having it thought that you merely fancied the scene by the lake. I know now - and this is what you do not want to be reminded of - that you did fancy that Herr K.’s proposals were serious, and that he would not leave off until you had married him.’

¹ The theme of waiting till the goal is reached occurs in the content of the first situation in the dream. I recognize in this phantasy of waiting for a fiancée a portion of the third component of that situation. I have already alluded to the existence of this third component.

² In particular there was a speech which he had made in presenting Dora with a letter-case for Christmas in the last year in which they lived together at B.4 Dora had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and - came no more. Her father, who called on me two or three times afterwards, assured me that she would come back again, and said it was easy to see that she was eager for the treatment to continue. But it must be confessed that Dora’s father was never entirely straightforward. He had given his support to the treatment so long as he could hope that I should ‘talk’ Dora out of her belief that there was something more than a friendship between him and Frau K. His interest faded when he observed that it was not my intention to bring about that result. I knew Dora would not come back again. Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their highest, and her thus bringing those hopes to nothing - this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part. Her purpose of self-injury also profited by this action. No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. Might I perhaps have kept the girl under my treatment if I myself had acted a part, if I had exaggerated the importance to me of her staying on, and had shown a warm personal interest in her - a course which, even after allowing for my position as her physician, would have been tantamount to providing her with a substitute for the affection she longed for? I do not know. Since in every case a portion of the factors that are encountered under the form of resistance remains unknown, I have always avoided acting a part, and have contented myself with practising the humbler arts of psychology. In spite of every theoretical interest and of every endeavour to be of assistance as a physician, I keep the fact in mind that there must be some limits set to the extent to which psychological influence may be used, and I respect as one of these limits the patient’s own will and understanding.

Nor do I know whether Herr K. would have done any better if it had been revealed to him that the slap Dora gave him by no means signified a final ‘No’ on her part, but that it expressed the jealousy which had lately been roused in her, while her strongest feelings were still on his side. If he had disregarded that first ‘No’, and had continued to press his suit with a passion which left room for no doubts, the result might very well have been a triumph of the girl’s affection for him over all her internal difficulties. But I think she might just as well have been merely provoked into satisfying her craving for revenge upon him all the more thoroughly. It is never possible to calculate towards which side the decision will incline in such a conflict of motives: whether towards the removal of the repression or towards its reinforcement. Incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand is one of the most essential features of a neurosis. Neurotics are dominated by the opposition between reality and phantasy. If what they long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it; and they abandon themselves to their phantasies the most readily where they need no longer fear to see them realized. Nevertheless, the barrier erected by repression can fall before the onslaught of a violent emotional excitement produced by a real cause; it is possible for a neurosis to be overcome by reality. But we have no general means of calculating through what person or what event such a cure can be effected.¹

¹ I will add a few remarks on the structure of this dream, though it is not possible to understand it thoroughly enough to allow of a synthesis being attempted. A prominent piece of the dream is to be seen in the phantasy of revenge against her father, which stands out like a façade in front of the rest. (She had gone away from home by her own choice; her father was ill, and then dead... Then she went home; all the others were already at the cemetery. She went to her room, not the least sadly, and calmly began reading the encyclopaedia.) This part of the material also contained two allusions to her other act of revenge, which she had actually carried out, when she let her parents discover a farewell letter from her. (The letter - from her mother, in the dream and the mention of the funeral of the aunt who had always been her model.) Behind this phantasy lie concealed her thoughts of revenge against Herr K., for which she found an outlet in her behaviour to me. (The maidservant, the invitation, the wood, the two and a half hours - all these came from material connected with the events at L--.) Her recollection of the governess, and of the latter’s exchange of letters with her parents, is related, no less than her farewell letter, to the letter in the dream allowing her to come home. Her refusal to let herself be accompanied and her decision to go alone may perhaps be translated into these words: ‘Since you have treated me like a servant, I shall take no more notice of you, I shall go my own way by myself, and not marry.’ - Screened by these thoughts of revenge, glimpses can be caught in other places of material derived from tender phantasies based upon the love for Herr K. which still persisted unconsciously in Dora. (‘I would have waited for you till I could be your wife’ - defloration - childbirth.) -Finally, we can see the action of the fourth and most deeply buried group of thoughts - those relating to her love for Frau K. - in the fact that the phantasy of defloration is represented from the man’s point of view (her identification of herself with her admirer who lived abroad) and in the fact that in two places there are the clearest allusions to ambiguous speeches (‘Does Herr -- live here?’) and to that source of her sexual knowledge which had not been oral (the encyclopaedia). - Cruel and sadistic tendencies find satisfaction in this dream.

IV POSTSCRIPT

It is true that I have introduced this paper as a fragment of an analysis; but the reader will have discovered that it is incomplete to a far greater degree than its title might have led him to expect. It is therefore only proper that I should attempt to give a reason for the omissions - which are by no means accidental.

A number of the results of the analysis have been omitted, because at the time when work was broken off they had either not been established with sufficient certainty or they required further study before any general statement could be made about them. At other points, where it seemed to be permissible, I have indicated the direction along which some particular solution would probably have been found to lie. I have in this paper left entirely out of account the technique, which does not at all follow as a matter of course, but by whose means alone the pure metal of valuable unconscious thoughts can be extracted from the raw material of the patient’s associations. This brings with it the disadvantage of the reader being given no opportunity of testing the correctness of my procedure in the course of this exposition of the case. I found it quite impracticable, however, to deal simultaneously with the technique of analysis and with the internal structure of a case of hysteria: I could scarcely have accomplished such a task, and if I had, the result would have been almost unreadable. The technique of analysis demands an entirely separate exposition, which would have to be illustrated by numerous examples chosen from a very great variety of cases and which would not have to take the results obtained in each particular case into account. Nor have I attempted in this paper to substantiate the psychological postulates which will be seen to underlie my descriptions of mental phenomena. A cursory attempt to do so would have effected nothing; an exhaustive one would have been a volume in itself. I can only assure the reader that I approached the study of the phenomena revealed by observation of the psychoneuroses without being pledged to any particular psychological system, and that I then proceeded to adjust my views until they seemed adapted for giving an account of the collection of facts which had been observed. I take no pride in having avoided speculation; the material for my hypotheses was collected by the most extensive and laborious series of observations. The decidedness of my attitude on the subject of the unconscious is perhaps specially likely to cause offence, for I handle unconscious ideas, unconscious trains of thought, and unconscious impulses as though they were no less valid and unimpeachable psychological data than conscious ones. But of this I am certain - that any one who sets out to investigate the same region of phenomena and employs the same method will find himself compelled to take up the same position, however much philosophers may expostulate.

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