[276]
It is part of the mechanism of this process, as understood by these
authors, that the physical symptoms of hysteria are constituted, by a
process of conversion, out of the injured emotions, which then sink into
the background or altogether out of consciousness. Thus, they found the
prolonged tension of nursing a near and dear relative to be a very
frequent factor in the production of hysteria. For instance, an originally
rheumatic pain experienced by a daughter when nursing her father becomes
the symbol in memory of her painful psychic excitement, and this perhaps
for several reasons, but chiefly because _its presence in consciousness
almost exactly coincided with that excitement_. In another way, again,
nausea and vomiting may become a symbol through the profound sense of
disgust with which some emotional shock was associated. Then the symbol
begins to have a life of its own, and draws hidden strength from the
emotion with which it is correlated. Breuer and Freud have found by
careful investigation that the pains and physical troubles of hysteria are
far from being capricious, but may be traced in a varying manner to an
origin in some incident, some pain, some action, which was associated with
a moment of acute psychic agony. The process of conversion was an
involuntary escape from an intolerable emotion, comparable to the physical
pain sometimes sought in intense mental grief, and the patient wins some
relief from the tortured emotions, though at the cost of psychic
abnormality, of a more or less divided state of consciousness and of
physical pain, or else anaesthesia.
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