The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud
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she suddenly understood her rule not to let the pillow come in contact with the bed. The pillows always had seemed a woman to her, the erect back of the bed a man. By means of magic, we may say, she wished to keep apart man and wife; it was her parents she wished to separate, so to prevent their marital intercourse. She had sought to attain the same end by more direct methods in earlier years, before the institution of her ceremonial. She had simulated fear or exploited a genuine timidity in order to keep open the door between the parents’ bedroom and the nursery. This demand had been retained in her present ceremonial. Thus she had gained the opportunity of overhearing her parents, a proceeding which at one time subjected her to months of sleeplessness. Not content with this disturbance to her parents, she was at that time occasionally able to gain her point and sleep between father and mother in their very bed. Then “pillow” and “wooden wall” could really not come in contact. Finally when she became so big that her presence between the parents could not longer be borne comfortably, she consciously simulated fear and actually succeeded in changing places with her mother and taking her place at her father’s side. This situation was undoubtedly the starting point for the phantasies, whose after-effects made themselves felt in her ritual.
If a pillow represented a woman, then the shaking of the featherbed till all the feathers were lumped at one end, rounding it into a prominence, must have its meaning also. It meant the impregnation of the wife; the ceremonial, however, never failed to provide for the annulment, of this pregnancy by the flattening down of the feathers. Indeed, for years our patient had feared that the intercourse between her parents might result in another child which would be her rival. Now, where the large pillow represents a woman, the mother, then the small pillow could be nothing but the daughter. Why did this pillow have to be placed so as to form a rhomb; and why did the girl’s head have to rest exactly upon the diagonal? It was easy to remind the patient that the rhomb on all walls is the rune used to represent the open female genital. She herself then played the part of the man, the father, and her head took the place of the male organ. (Cf. the symbol of beheading to represent castration.)
Wild ideas, you will say, to run riot in the head of a virgin girl. I admit it, but do not forget that I have not created these ideas but merely interpreted them. A sleep ritual of this kind is itself very strange, and you cannot deny the correspondence between the ritual and the phantasies that yielded us the interpretation. For my part I am most anxious that you observe in this connection that no single phantasy was projected in the ceremonial, but a number of them had to be integrated — they must have their nodal points somewhere in space. Observe also that the observance of the ritual reproduce the sexual desire now positively, now negatively, and serve in part as their rejection, again as their representation.
It would be possible to make a better analysis of this ritual by relating it to other symptoms of the patient. But we cannot digress in that direction. Let the suggestion suffice that the girl is subject to an erotic attachment to her father, the beginning of which goes back to her earliest childhood. That perhaps is the reason for her unfriendly attitude toward her mother. Also we cannot escape the fact that the analysis of this symptom again points to the sexual life of the patient. The more we penetrate to the meaning and purpose of neurotic symptoms, the less surprising will this seem to us.
By means of two selected illustrations I have demonstrated to you that neurotic symptoms carry just as much meaning as do errors and the dream, and that they are intimately connected with the experience of the patient. Can I expect you to believe this vitally significant statement on the strength of two examples? No. But can you expect me to cite further illustrations until you declare yourself convinced? That too is impossible, since considering the explicitness with which I treat each individual case, I would require a five-hour full semester course for the explanation of this one point in the theory of the neuroses. I must content myself then with having given you one proof for my assertion and refer you for the rest to the literature of the subject, above all to the classical interpretation of symptoms in Breuer’s first case (hysteria) as well as to the striking clarification of obscure symptoms in the so-called dementia praecox by C. G. Jung, dating from the time when this scholar was still content to be a mere psychoanalyst — and did not yet want to be a prophet; and to all the articles that have subsequently appeared in our periodicals. It is precisely investigations of this sort which are plentiful. Psychoanalysts have felt themselves so much attracted by the analysis, interpretation and translation of neurotic symptoms, that by contrast they seem temporarily to have neglected other problems of neurosis.
Whoever among you takes the trouble to look into the matter will undoubtedly be deeply impressed by the wealth of evidential material. But he will also encounter difficulties. We have learned that the meaning of a symptom is found in its relation to the experience of the patient. The more highly individualized the symptom is, the sooner we may hope to establish these relations. Therefore the task resolves itself specifically into the discovery for every nonsensical idea and useless action of a past situation wherein the idea had been justified and the action purposeful. A perfect example for this kind of symptom is the compulsive act of our patient who ran to the table and rang for the maid. But there are symptoms of a very different nature which are by no means rare. They must be called typical symptoms of the disease, for they are approximately alike in all cases, in which the individual differences disappear or shrivel to such an extent that it is difficult to connect them with the specific experiences of the patient and to relate them to the particular situations of his past. Let us again direct our attention to the compulsion neurosis. The sleep ritual of our second patient is already quite typical, but bears enough individual features to render possible what may be called an historic interpretation. But all compulsive patients tend to repeat, to isolate their actions from others and to subject them to a rhythmic sequence. Most of them wash too much. Agoraphobia (topophobia, fear of spaces), a malady which is no longer grouped with the compulsion neurosis, but is now called anxiety hysteria, invariably shows the same pathological picture; it repeats with exhausting monotony the same feature, the patient’s fear of closed spaces, of large open squares, of long stretched streets and parkways, and their feeling of safety when acquaintances accompany them, when a carriage drives after them, etc. On this identical groundwork, however, the individual differences between the patients are superimposed — moods one might almost call them, which are sharply contrasted in the various cases. The one fears only narrow streets, the other only wide ones, the one can go out walking only when there are few people abroad, the other when there are many. Hysteria also, aside from its wealth of individual features, has a superfluity of common typical symptoms that appear to resist any facile historical methods of tracing them. But do not let us forget that it is by these typical symptoms that we get our bearings in reaching a diagnosis. When, in one case of hysteria we have finally traced back a typical symptom to an experience or a series of similar experiences, for instance followed back an hysterical vomiting to its origin in a succession of disgust impressions, another case of vomiting will confuse us by revealing an entirely different chain of experiences, seemingly just as effective. It seems almost as though hysterical patients must vomit for some reason as yet unknown, and that the historic factors, revealed by analysis, are chance pretexts, seized on as opportunity best offered to serve the purposes of a deeper need.
Thus we soon reach the discouraging conclusion that although we can satisfactorily explain the individual neurotic symptom by relating it to an experience, our science fails us when it comes to the typical symptoms that occur far more frequently. In addition, remember that I am not going into all the detailed difficulties which come up in the course of resolutely hunting down an historic interpretation of the symptom. I have no intention of doing this, for though I want to keep nothing from you, and so paint everything in its true colors, I still do not wish to confuse and discourage you at the very outset of our studies. It is true that we have only begun to understand the interpretation of symptoms, but we wish to hold fast to the results we have achieved, and struggle forward step by step toward the mastery of the still unintelligible data. I therefore try to cheer you with the thought that a fundamental between the two kinds of symptoms can scarcely be assumed. Since the individual symptoms are so obviously dependent upon the experience of the patient, there is a possibility that the typical symptoms revert to an experience that is in itself typical and common to all humanity. Other regularly recurring features of neurosis, such as the repetition and doubt of the compulsion neurosis, may be universal reactions which are forced upon the patient by