We pass then to the realm of delusions and hallucinations. Both symptoms occur in all mental diseases and also in hysteria. One therefore deals with mechanisms which are universally formed and are set free by the most variable injuries. What chiefly interests us is the content of the delusions and hallucinations to which we may also add the pathological fancies. Here, too, hysteria, this most transparent disease, can help us. Obsessive ideas can be placed parallel to delusions; so may also the affective narrow-minded prejudices which are so often met with in hysteria, and the stubbornly asserted bodily pains and complaints. I cannot repeat the genesis of these hysterical and delusional assertions, I must presuppose a knowledge of Freud's investigations. The delusional assertions of the hysteric are transferences, that is, the accompanying affect does not belong to them but to a repressed complex, which is veiled in this manner. An indomitable obsessive idea only goes to show that a complex (generally sexual) is repressed; the same is true of the other stubbornly asserted hysterical symptoms. We now have a well-grounded hypothesis (I base this on many dozens of analyses), that an undoubtedly similar process exists in the delusional
an example I cite one of his cases: Miss M. S. twenty-six years old, educated and intelligent, six years ago passed through a brief psychosis, but has so well recovered that she was discharged as cured and the diagnosis of dementia præcox was not made. Before the present attack she fell in love with a composer from whom she took singing lessons. Her love soon reached a passionate height accompanied by periods of insane excitement. She was then brought to the Burghölzli asylum. At first she looked upon her confinement and her new experiences in the asylum as a descent into the underworld. She got this idea from her teacher's last composition which was "Charon." Then after this purifying passage through the underworld she interpreted everything happening about her in the sense of vicissitudes and struggles which she had to undergo in order to become united with her lover. Patient then considered another patient as being her lover and for a couple of nights went into her bed. She then thought herself pregnant, felt and heard twins in her womb, a girl resembling herself and a boy resembling the father. Later she thought that she gave birth to a child and had hallucinations of having a child in bed. With this the psychosis came to a close. She had found a solacing substitute for reality. She soon became quiet, her behavior freer, the rigidity in her attitude and gait disappeared and she readily gave catamnestic information, so that her statements could be well compared with those in the hospital records.
