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قراءة كتاب The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 10
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
became quite unbearable to him—so much so that, feeble in willpower and lacking in initiative as he was and is, he was compelled to leave home and live with his aunt, since his wife had practically deserted him. Although she had sold out the furniture and the rest of the furnishings of the home, and had pocketed the money thus received, she repeatedly called at his aunt's home for no other purpose than to force him to pay her sums of money for her weekly maintenance. On each such visit she would act the tyrant, would storm and rage furiously, would subject him to stinging rebukes and deliver biting tongue-lashings, causing him in consequence to be much upset and nervous the rest of the day. The very morning on which he had had the attack, which was followed by his present trouble (partial aphonia and partial hemiplegia) his wife had paid him one of these unusually stormy and noisy, and, to say the least, unwelcome visits. She had carried the attack to such a point that our patient became so emotionally upset (he is a harmless, emotional, kindly, unassuming and indifferent sort of old fellow) that he suddenly was attacked with nausea and vomiting, and, frightened, fell to the floor, with the consequences above detailed. I need not go further into the history and analysis of this case, but the story thus far elicited is more than sufficient to show that here we have a specific instance in which, by the analysis of a single dream, we have arrived at the genesis of an hysterical paralytic syndrome of four months' duration. The analysis took but a few minutes. It may be mentioned, in parentheses, that a full knowledge of the cause of the condition did not lead to a disappearance of the palsy. In other words, as we all know, knowledge per se does not lead to action or to the assertion or development of the will-power. I may say, also, that the events here related were not suppressed or repressed, for, as soon as the question of his wife was taken up, the patient admitted that it was she who was the real cause of his present conditions, and he thereupon detailed the story above related. He assured me that he had always been fully aware that it was she who had brought about his present condition, although, of course, he did not know whether he had had an hysterical, apoplectic or other sort of attack. In fact he believed his condition was permanent and incurable— especially since he had been treated at various neurological clinics for many weeks past without the slightest improvement or progress.
Were we to follow up this history we could unearth the full life history of this patient, including the genesis of his early attack of aphonia. But I deem this unnecessary and inadvisable in this paper, as mentioned previously.
Here, then, we have a definite case in which by the analysis of a single and incidentally the first dream we have arrived at the genesis of the psychoneurotic disorder.