Studies in Word-Association Experiments in the Diagnosis of Psychopathological Conditions

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...traversed by the psychological process. He found that the hysterical symptom is essentially a symbol for presentations (sexual in the ultimate analysis) which are not present in the conscious, but are repressed from the conscious by strong inhibitions. Repression arises from the critical presentations being so charged with pain (unpleasure) as to be insupportable to the conscious self. Inseparably bound up with this conception is the psycho 1 "Bnichstuck einer Hysterieanalyse," Monatssckrift fiir Psychiatrie u. Neurologie, 1905. Republished in Sammlung hleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, zweite Folge. analytic method. It provides us with the knowledge of the repressed material of presentation that has become unconscious. If we ask patients directly as to the cause of their illness we always receive incorrect, or at least imperfect, information. If we did receive correct information as in other (physical) illnesses, we should have known long ago about the psychogenic nature of hysteria. But it is just the point of hysteria that it represses the real cause, the psychic trauma, forgets it and replaces it by superficial " cover causes." That is why hysterics ceaselessly tell us that their illness arose from a cold, from overwork, from real organic disorders. And many physicians thus allow themselves again and again to be deceived. Others go to the opposite extreme and maintain that all hysterics he. But that is because they completely misconceive the psychological conditionings of hysteria, which really consist in this, that presentations insupportable to the conscious ego are repressed and cannot be therefore reproduced. Freud's psycho-analytic methods circumvent the inhibitions which the conscious ego sets up towards...