Studies on Hysteria
...stove at the time she learned that she may have to leave. Her mind blocked out the trauma (her fear) by replacing it with a physical discomfort. Miss Lucy R. could not deal with these events and feelings mentally, so her psyche developed a replacement for this. Such as the case with Miss Emmy Von N. whose arm was paralyzed at the death of her father. Miss Elizabeth Von R. experienced the same physical discomfort with the pain in her legs. Her leg pains had begun during a holiday in the company of her sister and her brother-in-law, for whom Elisabeth developed a special fondness. She admittedly longed to find a man like him. In fact, her pains had achieved their fullest force after a long walk she took with her sister’s husband, right before her sister suddenly died. Freud notices that Elisabeth describes all of her most painful memories with respect to her legs: sitting by herself on a mountain; standing over her father, by her dead sister’s bed; walking with her brother-in-law. These neurosis were brought on by the mind, the psyche did not know how to handle the emotional trauma these women were going through. When Freud was trying to find the source of the hysterical reactions, he had to unravel a chain of events sometimes passing through years. He had to separate what was significant to the patient, and what was not. He looked at the symptom as if it were a mystery that he was trying to solve. The deeper he dug, the more about the patient he learned and the more symptoms he uncovered. Freud writes, “I therefore decided to make the smell of burnt pudding the starting-point of the analysis” (p 107), the mystery was in front of him and he had to solve it in order to give Lucy peace of mind. The symptom is a mental substitution when the mind does not have the ability to react. If there is no suitable reaction in deeds, words or even tears, and the memory of the trauma is repressed, the event retains its affective tone until the healing process begins. In the case studies of Freud and Breuer in Studies on Hysteria, the memories of these women came to light under different circumstances, but each of them felt the trauma lik...