Free Freud - Complete Works by Sigmund Freud Page A

hallucination of a horrifying kind and
was keeping the intruding material at bay with this formula.¹
These interpolations came to an end with equal suddenness and the
patient took up what she had been saying, without pursuing her
momentary excitement any further, and without explaining or
apologizing for her behaviour - probably, therefore, without
herself having noticed the interpolation.²
       I learned what follows of her
circumstances. Her family came from Central Germany, but had been
settled for two generations in the Baltic Provinces of Russia,
where it possessed large estates. She was one of fourteen children,
of which she herself in the thirteenth. Only four of them survive.
She was brought up carefully, but under strict discipline by an
over-energetic and severe mother. When she was twenty-three she
married an extremely gifted and able man who had made a high
position for himself as an industrialist on a large scale, but was
much older than she was. After a short marriage he died of a
stroke. To this event, together with the task of bringing up her
two daughters, now sixteen and fourteen years old, who were often
ailing and suffered from nervous troubles, she attributed her own
illness. Since her husband’s death, fourteen years ago, she
had been constantly ill with varying degrees of severity. Four
years ago her condition was temporarily improved by a course of
massage combined with electric baths. Apart from this, all her
efforts to regain her health have been unsuccessful. She has
travelled a great deal and has many lively interests. She lives at
present in a country seat on the Baltic near a large town. For
several months she has once more been very ill, suffering from
depression and insomnia, and tormented with pains; she went to
Abbazia in the vain hope of improvement, and for the last six weeks
has been in Vienna, up till now in the care of a physician of
outstanding merit.
       I suggested that she should
separate from the two girls, who had their governess, and go into a
nursing home, where I could see her every day. This she agreed to
without raising the slightest objection.
     
       ¹ These words did in fact represent a
protective formula, and this will be explained later on. Since then
I have come across similar protective formulas in a melancholic
woman who endeavoured by their means to control her tormenting
thoughts - wishes that something bad might happen to her husband
and her mother, blasphemies, etc.
       ² What we had here was a hysterical delirium
which alternated with normal consciousness, just as a true tic
intrudes into a voluntary movement without interfering with it and
without being mixed up with it.
     
----
    Studies On Hysteria
    48
     
     
       On the evening of May 2 I
visited her in the nursing home. I noticed that she started
violently whenever the door opened unexpectedly. I therefore
arranged that the nurses and the house physicians, when they
visited her, should give a loud knock at her door and not enter
till she had told them to come in. But even so, she still made a
grimace and gave a jump every time anyone entered.
       Her chief complaint to-day was of
sensations of cold and pain in her left leg which proceeded from
her back above the iliac crest. I ordered her to be given warm
baths and I shall massage her whole body twice a day.
       She is an excellent subject for
hypnotism. I had only to hold up a finger in front of her and order
her to go to sleep, and she sank back with a dazed and confused
look. I suggested that she should sleep well, that all her symptoms
should get better, and so on. She heard all this with closed eyes
but with unmistakably concentrated attention; and her features
gradually relaxed and took on a peaceful appearance. After this
first hypnosis she retained a dim memory of my words; but already
at the second there was complete somnambulism (with amnesia). I had
warned her that I proposed to hypnotize her, to which she raised no
difficulty. She