440-441 / 536
THE SPEAKING BODY
Xth Congress of the WAP,
Rio de Janeiro 2016
441
440
1.
Sigmund Freud
I /a. Affect, Defense, Trauma
Extracts from Freud’s Footnotes to His Translation of Charcot’s
Tuesday Lectures
(1892 – 1894). [SE, I]
“A trauma would have to be defined as an
accretion of excitation
in the nervous
system,
which the latter has been unable to dispose of adequately by motor reaction.
”
p. 137
Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical
Motor Paralyses
(1893 [1888 – 1893]). [SE, I]
“(…) I, on the contrary, assert that the lesion in hysterical paralyses must be
completely independent of the anatomy of the nervous system, since
in its
paralyses and other manifestations hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist
or as though it had no knowledge of it.
(…) It takes the organs in the ordinary, popular sense they bear… ”
p. 169
“Considered psychologically, the paralysis of the arm consists in the fact that
the conception of the arm cannot enter into association with the other ideas
constituting the ego of which the subject’s body forms an important part.
The lesion would therefore be
the abolition of the associative accessibility of the
conception of the arm
. The arm behaves as though it did not exist for the play of
associations.”
p. 170
Studies on Hysteria (1893 – 1895). [SE, II]
On the Psychical Mechanism of Histerical Phenomena: Preliminary
Communication
(1893)
“In traumatic neuroses, the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling
physical injury but the affect of fright –the psychical trauma.”
p. 5-6
“We must presume rather that the psychical trauma –or more precisely the
memory of the trauma– acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must
continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”
p. 6
“But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be
‘abreacted’ almost as effectively.”
p. 8
“It will now be understood how it is that the psychotherapeutic procedure
which we have described in these pages has a curative effect.
It brings to an
end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by
allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech
(…).”
p. 17
« Case Histories » (1895). [SE, II]
Frau Emmy von N., age 40, from Livonia
“I showed from examples from ordinary life that a cathexis such as this of an
idea whose affect is unresolved always involves a certain amount of associative
inaccessibility and of incompatibility with new cathexes.”
p. 89
Fräulein Elisabeth von R.
“I therefore questioned her about
the causes and circumstances of the first appearance of the pains.”
p. 155
“She repressed her erotic idea from consciousness and transformed the amount
of its affect into physical sensations of pain.”
p. 164
“The motive was that of defence, the refusal on the part of the patient’s whole
ego to come to terms with this ideational group. The mechanism was that of
conversion: i.e. in place of the mental pains which she avoided, physical pains
made their appearance.”
p. 166
“In these examples the mechanism of symbolization seems to be reduced to
secondary importance, as is no doubt the general rule.”
p. 179
« The Psychotherapy of Hysteria » [SE, II]
“No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But
you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed
into transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a
mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that
unhappiness.”
p. 305
« Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria » (1905 [1901]). [SE,
VII]
“In this connection we must recall the question which has so often been raised,
whether the symptoms of hysteria are of psychical or of somatic origin, or
Sigmund Freud