"[274]
The influence of fear is not denied by Breuer and Freud, but they have
found that careful psychic analysis frequently shows that the shock of a
commonplace "fear" is really rooted in a lesion of the sexual emotions. A
typical and very simple illustration is furnished in a case, recorded by
Breuer, in which a young girl of seventeen had her first hysterical attack
after a cat sprang on her shoulders as she was going downstairs. Careful
investigation showed that this girl had been the object of somewhat ardent
attentions from a young man whose advances she had resisted, although her
own sexual emotions had been aroused. A few days before, she had been
surprised by this young man on these same dark stairs, and had forcibly
escaped from his hands. Here was the real psychic traumatism, the
operation of which merely became manifest in the cat. "But in how many
cases," asks Breuer, "is a cat thus reckoned as a completely sufficient
_causa efficiens_?"
In every case that they have investigated Breuer and Freud have found some
similar secret lesion of the psychic sexual sphere. In one case a
governess, whose training has been severely upright, is, in spite of
herself and without any encouragement, led to experience for the father of
the children under her care an affection which she refuses to acknowledge
even to herself; in another, a young woman finds herself falling in love
with her brother-in-law; again, an innocent girl suddenly discovers her
uncle in the act of sexual intercourse with her playmate, and a boy on his
way home from school is subjected to the coarse advances of a sexual
invert.
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