[189]. For instance, when I came to the therapeutics I found in abstraction that the patient did not want to give up her point of view “because,” as she said, “it forms an excuse so that when I feel lonely, if there is nothing else to be lonely about, I have that memory and point of view to fall back upon as something to justify my crying and feeling lonely and blue.”
When she now feels blue and cries, as happens occasionally, and she asks herself Why? then she drifts back in her mind to childhood and remembers she was lonely and then cries the harder. Then she vaguely thinks of her mother’s death being her fault. She likes therefore to hold on to this as a peg on which to hang any present feeling of blueness and loneliness.
[190]. Some, I have no doubt, will insist upon seeing in towers with bells a sexual symbol, and in the self-reproach a reaction to a repressed infantile or other sexual wish. But I cannot accede to this view first, because a tower was not only not the real object of the phobia, but not even the alleged object, which was the ringing of bells; secondly, because it is an unnecessary postulate unsupported by evidence, and, thirdly, because in fact, the associative memories of early life were conspicuously free from sex knowledge, wishes, curiosity, episodes and imaginings, nor was there any evidence of the so-called “mother complex” or “father-complex,” or any other sexual complex that I could find after a most exhaustive probing. The impulses of instincts other than sexual are sufficient to induce psychical trauma, insistent ideas, and emotion. To hold otherwise is to substitute dogma for the evidence of experience.
[191]. It is worth noting that between the bringing to the “full light of day” the facts furnished by the analysis and the cure a full year and a half elapsed, during which the phobia continued. The “cure” was effected at one sitting. The original study was undertaken on purely psychological grounds; the cure for the purpose of completing the study.
[192]. This account will be clearer if read in connection with the full analysis (“A Clinical Study of a Case of Phobia”), published in the Jour, of Abn. Psychol., October-November, 1912.
[193]. She was apprehensive of having inherited Bright’s disease from her father, who had convulsions.
[194]. It is quite possible that this subconscious process induced the unreality syndrome in which struggling for air was the salient symptom.
[195]. I am excluding conditions like split personalities, automatic writing, etc., and refer rather to normal mental processes.
LECTURE XIV
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF EMOTION
Emotion,[[196]] more particularly fear, plays so large a part in the psychogenesis and symptomatology of the psychoses that it is desirable to have a clear realization of its physiological and psychological manifestations and of the disturbances of the organism which it can induce. It is not necessary for our purpose to discuss the various theories of the nature of emotion that have been propounded; we need deal only with the manifestations of emotion and its effect upon the organism.[[197]] We will consider the physiological manifestations first.