Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Chapter 32 Significance of Symptoms (2)
A well-developed and very intelligent girl of nineteen years, the only child of her parents, was therefore educationally and intellectually superior to her parents.She is lively and cheerful by nature, but she has become neurotic for no reason in recent years.She became irritable, especially with her mother; she was often depressed, suspicious, and hesitant, so much so that she later claimed that she no longer dared to walk through squares or streets alone.Here, we do not want to detail the complex symptoms of her condition. From her symptoms, it can be seen that there are at least two diagnoses, namely agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive psychosis; This preparatory ritual turned out to be very worrying for her parents.Generally speaking, normal people will have a kind of preparation before going to sleep, or at least certain conditions must be met to fall asleep; this process of going from waking to sleep often forms a certain pattern, which is repeated every night.However, the sleep conditions that healthy people need can be reasonably explained, and if the method changes due to changes in objective conditions, they can adapt to it immediately.A sick ritual, on the other hand, remains constant, and often requires great sacrifices to maintain this boring bedtime ritual; it also has apparently legitimate motives as an excuse, and unlike healthy people, it performs its rituals too cautiously.If you observe this more carefully, you will find that the reasons for this excuse are not so sufficient. All the actions of this ceremony cannot be covered up by the reasons listed, and some details directly contradict the reasons.In order to be able to fall asleep, the patient once claimed that she had to be in a very quiet environment at night and get rid of all the hustle and bustle before falling asleep.She did two things: stopped the big clock in the room, and took away all the small alarm clocks, even the small watch on the bedside table.All the flowerpots and vases were carefully placed on the writing desk, so as to prevent them from falling and breaking suddenly at night and disturbing her slumber.But she also understands that these reasons for seeking a quiet environment are far-fetched: even if you don't remove the small watch, you can't hear anything, and we also know that the ticking of the pendulum does not disturb sleep, but helps to fall asleep.The patient also thinks that the flower pots and vases will not fall even if they are placed in the same place. These worries are all over-the-top.As for the other actions of this ritual, it violated her motive of seeking tranquility.For example, she insisted on keeping the door between her parents and her bedroom open, and placed various obstacles at the door. Wouldn't she violate the taboo of silence? All these important rituals are related to the bed.The long pillows on the bed must be spaced from the wooden bed frame, and the small pillows should be arranged in a diamond shape on top of the long pillows; so she rests her head on this diamond shape.Then shake the duck feathers to make them droop and flatten, and then become even again, so that the duck feathers can be covered to sleep.

I will now omit various other details of this ceremony, because they give us no new material, and because they are too far removed from the narrative.But don't think that these little things are done peacefully.Every time she does something, she is always worried that she won’t do it well, and she must repeat it over and over again; she doubts this before, and then doubts that later, and it always takes two hours before she can fall asleep peacefully, or let her worried parents sleep peacefully.

The process of analyzing this type of disease is much more complicated than that of the previous patient.I was obliged to suggest some possible explanations, all of which she firmly denied, or laughed at incredulously.However, after an initial negative reaction, she began to consider the possibilities mentioned by these explanations and finally chose to accept them.After that, her compulsive behavior was gradually brought under control, and before the treatment was over, she had completely abandoned the ritual.However, I would like to remind you that the analytical work we do today is by no means continuously focused on a single symptom until its meaning is fully understood.Often we have to temporarily leave the problem we are working on and bring it up again later on in another direction.I will now say to you, therefore, that the explanation of the symptoms is indeed the synthesis of the results of many studies which were not completed until weeks or months later, when the studies were interrupted elsewhere.

Gradually, the patient understood that the clocks were taken outside at night because they were symbols of the female genitals.We have seen that besides this, there may be other kinds of symbols. The reason why it has the meaning of female genitalia is that it also has periodic movements and regular intervals.Women often boast that their periods are as regular as clockwork.And this patient is most afraid of the ticking of the clock disturbing the lucid dream.The sound of the clock can also be seen as the excitement of the clitoris during sexual arousal.Many times she had been awakened by this sensation; she had turned all the clocks away every night because of her fear of the excitement of her clitoris.Flower pots and vases are all containers, which are symbols of female genitalia.Therefore, it is of special significance to prevent them from falling and breaking at night.We understand that the widespread custom of breaking a flower pot or vase at an engagement, with all those present picking up a shard to signify no longer belonging to the bride, may arise someday in the days of monogamy.The patient had remembered something of the past from this part of the ritual, which aroused several associations.When she was a child, she once slipped and fell while holding a glass or porcelain vase, and her finger was cut and bled profusely.She knew about copulation when she was growing up, and she was worried that she would not be a virgin if she did not bleed.Her fear of breaking the vase not only expresses her desire to put aside all the complexes about chastity and normal coitus bleeding, but also to get rid of the anxiety that she will not bleed.In reality, her concerns had quite a lot to do with preventing voices.

One day she thought about the core idea of ​​the ritual, and suddenly understood why she didn't touch the ottoman to the back of the bed.She thought the long pillow looked like a woman, and the straight back of the bed looked more like a man.So, as if by a magical ritual, she separates the man from the woman; the father from the mother so that copulation does not take place.For many years before this ritual appeared, she had used a more direct method to achieve this goal.She feigned a tendency to be timid or easily frightened, leaving the door between her bedroom and that of her parents wide open.It's still part of the ritual today, and she uses it to eavesdrop on her parents.The incident caused her to lose sleep for months.She is still not satisfied with bothering her parents so much, and sometimes she sleeps between them.Therefore, she separates the "pillow" from the "back of the bed".Later, when she grew up, she could no longer share the bed with her parents as a matter of course, so she pretended to be timid and scared, so that her mother would switch with her so that she could sleep with her father.There is no doubt that this event was the beginning of fantasy, and its results are evident in this ritual.

If the bolster is a symbol of womanhood, it is true that she shakes the eiderdown to make the feathers fall and bulge.What does it mean?The answer is pregnancy; however, she doesn't want her mother to become pregnant again, and she has always been very worried about the result of her parents' intercourse, maybe they will have another child, and then there will be another opponent.Conversely, if the long pillow represents the mother and the small pillow represents the daughter.As for placing the little pillow on top of the bolster to form a rhombus, what was her purpose in resting her head in the center of the rhombus?She quickly realized that the rhombus was often used in wall paintings to represent female genitalia.She therefore sees herself as male or father, with her head representing the male genitalia.

You may ask, can a virgin have such terrible thoughts in her heart?I admit it's a horrible thought.You must remember, however, that I did not create such ideas, but merely made them visible.These bedtime rituals are really strange, and you need not deny the similarity between them and phantasies which the explanation reveals.But I think you should remember that this ritual is not the product of a single phantasy, but is more important that it is a mixture of several phantasies, but the several phantasies always converge to a certain point.You must still bear in mind that the details of the girl's ritual have both negative and positive effects on sexual excitement, partly as sexual excitement, partly as sexual repression.

The results might be richer if we analyzed the patient's other symptoms in relation to the ritual.But our present goal is not it.Now you must understand that the patient had developed a "sexual obsession" with his father in early childhood.This obsession made her fascinated, like crazy.Perhaps that was the reason why she had such bad feelings for her mother.One more point that we cannot easily overlook is that the analysis of this symptom once again points to the patient's sexual life.The more we understand the meaning and purpose of psychotic symptoms, the less surprising it becomes.

From the above two examples, you have seen that psychotic symptoms have meaning, are no different from faults and dreams, and that those symptoms are also closely related to the patient's lived experience.But I hope you can understand the meaning of my sentence after the analysis of these two cases?Of course not.But do you want me to continue giving more examples until you believe it?Of course that's not true; since every patient has to go through a long period of treatment, if I want to discuss the theory of psychotic symptoms adequately, I can't avoid talking about five hours a week and taking a semester to finish it.I must therefore confirm my theory with these two examples only; you may refer to the works on the subject, such as those by Breuer and Jung, and in our various papers.Now that the analytic interpretation of the psychotic symptoms has attracted the analyst's attention, the other symptoms of natural psychosis have been temporarily put on hold.

Whoever among you has done any considerable research on this subject will appreciate the richness of the evidence.But there will be difficulties.We have learned that the meaning of a symptom is closely related to the patient's daily life.If the formation of this symptom varies from person to person, then we can detect this relationship more clearly.Therefore, we have to find out the circumstances under which this action appears and this idea arises for each boring idea and each useless action.The compulsive behavior of the above-mentioned patient who rang the bell at the table to summon the maid was a perfect model of this symptom.Symptoms quite different from this, however, are equally frequent.For example, certain typical symptoms are generally present in various cases, removing all individual differences, making it difficult to find the relationship between the disease and the specific situation in the patient's life or past.Let us return to obsessive-compulsive psychosis, and again take the example of the patient who performed the bedtime ritual, although she exhibits many individual characteristics that make her a "historical" explanation; but all obsessive-compulsive patients Always isolate a certain action and make regular reproductions.Many patients wash constantly, and patients with "agoraphobia" are no longer considered obsessive-compulsive psychopaths, but show the same pathological characteristics in the same impatient and monotonous way.They are terrified of fenced-in spaces, large squares, and long straight roads or paths, and feel protected if they are followed by someone or a car.However, in addition to the basic commonalities, each patient has his own unique situation, which differs significantly from each other.For example, patient A is afraid of small roads, patient B is afraid of big roads; while patient C sees few people around, patient D can only move forward when there are people around.The same is true for hysteria. Except for the special state of the individual patient, this symptom often has many common features, and it seems difficult to use the history of each person as the basis for explanation.But we must not forget that it is precisely because of this symptom that we are able to proceed to the next diagnosis.If we have seen that a particular symptom of hysteria arises from one experience or group of experiences, such as a hysterical vomit from a group of foul-smelling impressions, if we now find that another vomit arises from a completely different experience can get confusing.Hysterical patients always vomit for some unknown reason. After analysis, it can be found that the so-called historical reasons are just some excuses made up by the patients driven by their inner needs to cover up.

So, our conclusions are unavoidably frustrating.Although it is true that the individual specificity of psychotic symptoms can be ideally explained on the basis of the patient's historical experience, yet all the usual common symptoms of these symptoms are inexplicable by our psychoanalysis, and we have not told you so far that in seeking a certain disease It will also be difficult to make sense of the history of theI am not going to tell you that, although I did not intend to hide something from you, it is not advisable to make you so confused that you will be in a daze with surprise at the very beginning of our joint research.Although we are not just starting to understand the symptoms, we still stick to the acquired knowledge and solve the unknown problems step by step.I would therefore encourage you in the following way: that it is almost impossible to assume fundamental differences between symptoms.If the different symptoms of each patient can be explained by their life experience, it is possible that some typical symptoms cannot be explained by the common experience of human beings.Common features of psychosis, such as the repetitive movements and suspiciousness of obsessive-compulsive psychosis, are perhaps the most common responses, but the patient's pathological changes compel them to intensify them.In conclusion, we have no reason to be discouraged and should see what else we can discover.

We have encountered a very similar dilemma in the theory of dreams, which, however, we did not deal with in our previous discussion of dreams.The manifest content of dreams is inherently complex and individual; the results of an analysis of this content have already been discussed at length.However, some dreams can also be regarded as common to human beings, typical, and have the same content, so there is no difference in the difficulty of analysis.For example, dreams of falling, flying, floating, swimming, or being restrained, naked, and various anxiety dreams, these dreams have different interpretations depending on the dreamer, and what they have in common has not yet been explained .However, we have noticed that the common basis of these dreams is also mixed with individual characteristics.Perhaps the knowledge of the dream-life which can be gained from other dream studies will enable the interpretation of these dreams without forcing distortions, but gradually expanding our understanding of these facts enough.

(End of this chapter)