Phratry

“ I have comprised hysteria, obsessions, as well as certain cases of acute hallucinatory confusion. [47] All these affections evince one common aspect in the fact that their symptoms originated through the psychic mechanism of (unconscious) defense, that is, through the attempt to repress an unbearable idea which appeared in painful contrast to the ego of the patient. I was also able to explain and exemplify by cases reported in the preceding chapters in what sense this psychic process of “defense” or “repression” is to be understood. ”

“ It is the principle of harmony between the moral and physical nature constitutes the whole sacret of my system. To be stimulatin' the nerves, and lavin' the arteries dormant, is like playing a jig to minuet time,—all must move in simultaneous action; and the cerebellum, the great flywheel of the whole, must be made to keep orderly time. D'ye mind?”
“I follow you with great interest,” said Sir Horace, to whose subtle nature there was an intense pleasure in the thought of having discovered what he deemed a man of original genius under this unpromising exterior. ”

“ The ideas of the "defense" (abwehr) against an unbearable presentation, the origin of hysterical symptoms through conversion of psychic into physical excitement, the formation of a separate psychic group by an arbitrary act, leading to the defense—all these were in that moment palpably presented before my eyes. Thus and thus alone did things happen here. This girl entertained an affectionate regard for her brother-in-law against the acceptance of which into her consciousness her whole moral being struggled. ”

“ The Farnese Hercules is a living truth. I saw him in the street two days ago, and he was a Caffre coolie. The proportions of the head and throat were more wonderful in flesh, or muscle rather, than in marble. I know a Caffre girl of thirteen, who is a noble model of strength and beauty; such an arm—larger than any white woman’s—with such a dimple in her elbow, and a wrist and hand which no glove is small enough to fit—and a noble countenance too. ”

“ Here I find nothing other than the mechanism of symbolization which in a way stands midway between the mechanism of auto-suggestion and that of conversion.
The study of Mrs. Cäcilie M. gave me the opportunity to gather a collection of such symbolizations. A whole series of physical sensations which were otherwise looked upon as organically determined were of a psychic origin, or at least furnished with a psychic interpretation. A certain number of her experiences were accompanied by a piercing sensation in the region of the heart ("I felt a stitch in my heart") . ”

“ He sees the functions of the senses constituting distinct functions, and insists that the faculties of the soul must constitute equally distinct faculties; he sees each particular sense possessing an organ proper to itself, and thinks that each faculty of the soul must have its proper organ; [93] in one word, he looks upon the outer man, and constructs the inner man after the image of the outer man.
According to Gall, every thing between an organ of a sense and an organ of a faculty, between a faculty and sense, is similar. A [77] faculty is a sense. ”

“ Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;— (I forget which) —besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;—for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived. ”

“ The motive was that of defense, it was the striving of the whole ego to agree with this presentation group and the mechanism was that of conversion, that is, instead of psychic pains which she spared herself there appeared physical pains. Thus a transformation occurred through which pain the patient had escaped an unbearable psychic state, though it was at the cost of a psychic anomaly in the form of a splitting of consciousness and a physical suffering, pains, upon which an astasia-abasia was constructed. ”

“ Freud [1] has shown how among the dream symbols that represent the female genitals, another bodily organ, the mouth, is often employed, and what happens to it in the dream signifies what happens to the genitals. That just this displacement to the mouth is frequently utilized by the dream has its foundation in different determining factors. The mouth, because of its analogy, is a very obvious symbol in the same body; the relation to one's own person may be given very simple expression, etc. The mouth, moreover, is one of the Freudian erogenous zones. ”

“ The feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of a gregarious animal. Trotter also derives from the herd instinct the repressive forces which psycho-analysis has shown to exist in the ego, and from the same source accordingly the resistances which the physician comes up against in psycho-analytic treatment. Speech owes its importance to its aptitude for mutual understanding in the herd, and upon it the identification of the individuals with one another largely rests. ”

“ In some of Freud's followers this absorption in the sexual has gone to such lengths that perverse tendencies and prurient ideas are scented in every thought, waking or sleeping, of the patients who came under their care. ”

“ I feel you ought to fight it out with Harriet. Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like blasphemy. ”

“ But the ancient friar was a wise man, and full of observation on human nature, and he had attentively marked the lady's countenance when she heard herself accused, and noted a thousand blushing shames to start into her face, and then he saw an angel-like whiteness bear away those blushes, and in her eye he saw a fire that did belie the error that the prince did speak against her maiden truth, and he said to the sorrowing father, "Call me a fool; trust not my reading, nor my observation; trust not my age, my reverence, nor my calling ”

“ But nature has given him peculiar advantages which harmonize with the demands of the part, and which, in almost any other character in the range of tragedy, would either encumber the delineation or be of no avail. His figure is cast [Pg 303] in the proportions of the Farnese Hercules. The development of the muscles, indeed, rather exceeds the ideal of strength, and, in its excess, the beauty of symmetrical power is in some degree sacrificed. His head and neck are perfect models of grandeur in the order to which they belong. ”

“ This is the complete mechanism of the structure of a hysterical symptom. Or, on the other hand, the symptom may be the same as that of the person who is loved— (so, for instance, Dora in the 'Bruchstück einer Hysterieanalyse' [3] imitated her father's cough) ; in that case we can only describe the state of things by saying that identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed to identification. We have heard that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie ”

“ The chief importance in such cases lies in the nature of the trauma, to be sure in connection with the reaction of the person to the trauma. It is an indispensable condition for the acquirement of hysteria that there should arise a relation of incompatibility between the ego and some of its approaching presentations. I hope to be able to show in another place how a variety of neurotic disturbances originate from the different procedures which the “ego” pursues in order to free itself from that incompatibility. ”

“ The stages through which, according to the doctrines of Freud, the developing mind passes are not less repulsive when judged from the purely human point of view than are the phases of the body, which betray its cousinship with the fish and the frog, the lemur and the ape. ”

“ Almost every part of the human frame was menaced by a special fiend. One demon assailed the head, another the neck, another the hips, and so on. They bound a man's hands, they fettered his feet, they spat poison and gall on him. ”

“ These poems evidently made a success, and Horace returned to the theme in his 17th Epode. Here he writes as though he had been put under a spell by Canidia, in revenge for his former calumnies about her.
"My youth has fled, my rosy hue Turned to a wan and livid blue; Blanched by thy mixtures is my hair; No respite have I from despair. The days and nights, they wax and wane, Yet bring me no release from pain; Nor can I ease, howe'er I gasp, The spasm, which holds me in its grasp."
Here we have all the well-known symptoms of a man under a malign magical influence. ”

“ Of these the compulsion neurosis, which does not take that mysterious leap from the psychic to the physical, has through psychoanalytic research become more intimately comprehensible and transparent to us than hysteria, and we have come to understand that it reveals far more vividly certain extreme characteristics of the neuroses. ”

“ With shame she then held down her head,
and stood like one that's dumb
For she, God wot, began to dread,
the roaring of the bum.
O shameless lad, quoth Fryar Stone.
an ill death may'st thou die,
For this thy wicked art alone,
that makes her pellets fly. ”

“ In no other patient was I able to find such a prolific application of symbolization. To be sure, Mrs. Cäcilie M. was a person of quite unusual and of a special artistic temperament whose highly developed sense for form manifested itself in very beautiful poems. I maintain, however that if a hysteria creates through symbolization a somatic sensation for the emotionally accentuated presentation, it is due less to individual and arbitrary things than one supposes. ”

“ A face plastic and delicate, changes expression a hundred times a minute, maybe. Just so, if we permit it, the emotion of mind expresses itself on the pharynx. We cannot see the expression of the throat as we can that of the face, but we can hear it. That the pharynx may be able to receive the expression of the mind it must be plastic and delicate. If so, just the right form will be assumed for the idea we would express, and the proper quality would be given the tone. ”

“ I spoke of phrenology, he said, not with the object of criticising a system which has its good side, in so far as it tends to complete the series of physiological observations that aim at increasing our knowledge of man; I used the word phrenology because the only fatality that we believe in nowadays is that created by our own instincts. ”

“ The guardian is then overpowered, the unconscious excitations subdue the Forec.; through it they dominate our speech and actions, or they enforce the hallucinatory regression, thus governing an apparatus not designed for them by virtue of the attraction exerted by the perceptions on the distribution of our psychic energy. ”

“ But the most horrible of all was, that the evil spirit raised himself up between the skin and the flesh, in the form of a great adder or serpent, so that we could see and lay hold of him. Swiftly as by nature they glide along the earth, so did he glide backwards and forwards in the body ”

“ Their great muscles rose with the distinct outline of the sculptured form of a colossal Hercules, their bloated faces swelled up with gushes of red blood, which seemed almost to burst through the skin, and their bodies palpitated with savage emotion as the struggle continued. ”

“ From this we learn that the same incorrect psychic processes—as well as others that have not been enumerated—control the formation of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we at once find a series of perfectly correct thoughts equivalent to our conscious thoughts, of whose existence, however, in this form we can learn nothing and which we can only subsequently reconstruct. ”

“ In view of the complete identity found between the peculiarities of the dream-work and of the psychic activity forming the psychoneurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria. ”

“ The work of Freud embodies the most determined, thorough, and scientific attempt which has been made to penetrate the mysteries of the mind by the direct human method of approach, making use of introspection—guided and guarded, it is true, by an elaborate technique—as its essential instrument. ”

“ Liue, hart, to ioy at fond Horatios fall! BEL. Why stands Horatio speecheles all this while? HOR. The lesse I speak, the more I meditate. BEL. But whereon doost thou cheifely meditate? HOR. On dangers past and pleasures to ensue. BAL. On pleasures past and dangers to ensue! BEL. What dangers and what pleasures doost thou mean? HOR. Dangers of warre and pleasures of our loue. LOR. Dangers of death, but pleasures none at all! BEL. Let dangers goe; thy warre shall be with me, But such a [warre] as breakes no bond of peace. Speake thou faire words, Ile crosse them with faire words ”

“ Accordingly for centuries the army of superstitious interpreters of dreams stood over against that of the sceptics, until about ten years ago the Viennese neurologist, Professor Freud, discovered facts which make possible a unification of the two hostile conceptions, and which aided on the one hand in the discovery of the true nucleus in the age-old superstition, and on the other hand fully satisfied the scientific need of the knowledge of the connections between cause and effect. ”

“ Froissart is an insatiable Fry, who revels in all the sights of his day, events and personages, wars and galas, adventures of heroism or gallantry, and who is incessantly gadding about through all the dominions and all the courts of Europe, everywhere seeking his own special amusement in the satisfaction of his curiosity. ”

“ He belongs to a class of beings who, from the circumstances of birth and education, are destitute of the requisite amount of sense necessary to form a correct judgment on moral questions as well as many others.
“It is a popular error to suppose that phrenology depends upon ‘bumps,’ so called, or protuberances or hollows in the conformation of the skull. The conclusions of the phrenologist are based upon estimates of brain fiber, their quality and length from a point in the base of the brain directly between the ears, to the surface. ”