seem superfluous and impertinent when dealing with old hysterias in whom the mechanism of conversion was habitual, but this girl first acquired hysteria through this trauma, or at least through this slight distress.
From the analysis of similar cases I already knew that where hysteria is to be newly acquired one psychic determinant is indispensable; namely, that some presentation must intentionally be repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative elaboration.
In this intentional repression I also find the reason for the conversion of the sum of excitement, be it partial or total. The sum of excitement which is not to enter into psychic association more readily finds the wrong road to bodily innervation. The reason for the repression itself could only be a disagreeable feeling, the incompatibility of one of the repressible ideas with the ruling presentation-mass of the ego. The repressed presentation then avenges itself by becoming pathogenic.
From this I concluded that Miss Lucy R. merged into that moment of hysterical conversion, which must have been under the determinations of that trauma which she intentionally left in the darkness and which she took pains to forget. On considering her attachment for the children and her sensitiveness towards the other persons of the household, there remained but one interpretation which I was bold enough to impart to her. I told her that I did not believe that all these things were simply due to her affection for the children, but that I thought that she was rather in love with her master, perhaps unwittingly, that she really nurtured the hope of taking the place of the mother, and it was for that reason that she became so sensitive towards the servants with whom she had lived peacefully for years. She feared lest they would notice something of her hope and scoff at her.
She answered in her laconic manner: "Yes, I believe it is so."—"But if you knew that you were in love with the master, why did you not tell me so?"—"But I did not know it, or rather, I did not wish to know it. I wished to crowd it out of my mind, never to think of it, and of late I have been successful."[1]
- ↑ A better description of this peculiar state in which one knows something and at the same time does not know it, I could never obtain. It can apparently be understood only if one has found himself in such a
