CHAPTER X.
 

HYSTERICAL FANCIES AND THEIR RELATIONS TO BISEXUALITY.¹
 

The delusional formations of paranoiacs containing the great-
ness and sufferings of their own ego, which manifest them-
selves quite typically in almost monotonous forms are universally
familiar. Furthermore, through numerous communications we
became acquainted with the peculiar organizations by means of
which certain perverts put into operation their sexual gratifica-
tions, be it in fancy or reality. On the other hand it may sound
rather novel to some to hear that quite analogous psychic forma-
tions regularly appear in all psychoneuroses, especially in hysteria,
and that these so called hysterical fancies show important rela-
tions to the causation of the neurotic symptoms.
 

Of the same source and of the normal prototype are all these
fantastic creations, so called reveries of youth, which have already
gained a certain consideration in the literature, though not a suffi-
cient one. They are perhaps equally frequent in both sexes; in
girls and women they seem to be wholly of an erotic nature, while
in men they are of an erotic or ambitious nature. Yet even in
men the significance of the erotic moment is not to be put in the
second place, for on examining more closely the reveries of men
we generally learn that all these heroic acts are accomplished,
that all these successes are acquired in order to please a woman
and to be preferred to other men.³ These fancies are wish grati-
fications which emanate from privation and longing. They are
justly named "day dreams" for they give the key for the under-
*Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, herausgegeben von Hirschfeld, I,
 

1908.
 

Compare Breuer and Freud Studien über Hysterie, 1895. P. Janet,
Névroses et ideés fixes, I (Les rêveries subconscientes), 1898. Havelock
Ellis, Sexual Impulse and Modesty (German by Kötscher), 1900. Freud,
Traumdeutung, 1906, 2d ed., 1909. A. Pick, Über pathologische Träumerei
und ihre Beziehungen zur Hysteria, Jahrbuch für Psychiatrie und Neuro-
logie, XIV, 1896.
 

H. Ellis similarly expresses himself, 1. c., p. 185.
 

194
 

HYSTERICAL FANCIES. 195

standing of night dreams in which the nucleus of the dream for-
mation is produced by just such complicated, disfigured day
fancies which are misunderstood by the conscious psychic judg-
ment.‘

These day dreams are garnished with great interest, are cau-
tiously nurtured, and coyly guarded, as if they were numbered
among the most intimate estates of personality. On the street,
however, the day dreamer can be readily recognized by a sudden,
as if absent minded smile, by talking to himself, or by a running-
like acceleration of his gait wherein he designates the acme of
the imaginary situation.

All hysterical attacks which I have been thus far able to examine
proved to be such involuntary incursions of day dreams. Obser-
vation leaves no doubt that such fancies may exist as unconscious
or conscious and whenever they become unconscious they may
also become pathogenic, that is, they may express themselves in
symptoms and attacks. Under favorable conditions it is possible
for consciousness to seize such unconscious fancies. One of my
patients whose attention I have called to her fancies narrated
that once while in the street she suddenly found herself in tears,
and rapidly reflecting over the cause of her weeping the fancy
became clear to her. She fancied herself in delicate relationship
with a piano virtuoso familiar in the city, but whom she did not
know personally, In her fancy she bore him a child (she was
childless), and he then deserted her, leaving her and her child in
misery. At this passage of the romance she burst into tears.

The unconscious fancies are either from the first unconscious,
having been formed in the unconscious, or what is more fre-
quently the case they were once conscious fancies, day dreams,
and were then intentionally forgotten, merging into the uncon-
scious by “repression.” Their content then either remained the
same or underwent a transformation, so that the present uncon-
scious fancy represents a descendant of the once conscious one.
The unconscious fancy stands in a very important relation to the
sexual life of the person, it is really identical with that fancy
which helped it towards sexual gratification during a period of
masturbation. The masturbating act (in the broader sense the
onanistic) then consisted of two parts, the evocation of the fancy,

* Compare Freud, Traumdeutung, 2d ed., p. 302.

190 PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES.

and the active performance of self gratification at the height of
the same. This combination is familiarly in itself a soldering.’
Originally this action was a purely auto-erotic undertaking for
the pleasure obtained from a certain so called erogenous part of
the body. Later this action blended with a wish presentation
from the sphere of the object loved, and served for a partial
realization of the situation in which this fancy culminated. If,
then, the person forgoes in this manner the masturbo-fantastic
gratification, the action remains undone, the fancy, however,
changes from a conscious to an unconscious one. If no other
manner of sexual gratification occurs, if the person remains ab-
stinent and does not succeed in sublimating his libido, that is, in
diverting the sexual excitement to a higher aim, we then have the
conditions for the refreshment of the unconscious fancy ; it grows
exuberantly and with all the force of the desire for love at least
a fragment of its content becomes a morbid symptom.

The unconscious fancies are then the nearest psychical first
steps of a whole series of hysterical symptoms. The hysterical
symptoms are nothing other than unconscious fancies brought to
light by “conversion,” and insofar as they are somatic symptoms
they are frequently enough taken from the spheres of the sexual
feelings and motor innervations which originally accompanied the
former still conscious fancies. In this way the disuse of onanism
is really made retrograde, and the final aim of the whole patho-
logical process, the restoration of the primary sexual gratification,
though it never becomes perfect, in a manner always achieves a
certain approximation.

The interest of him who studies hysteria turns directly from the
symptoms to the fancies from which the former originate. ‘The
technique of psychoanalysis gives the means of finding out from
the symptoms the unconscious fancies, and then of bringing
them back to the patient’s consciousness. In this way it was
found that the unconscious fancies of hysterics perfectly corre-
spond in content to the consciously performed gratification situa-
tions of perverts. Those who lack examples of such nature
need only recall the historical managements of the Roman Caesars
whose frenzies were naturally only conditioned by the unrestricted

fullness of the fancy creators. The delusional formations of

* Compare Freud, Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, 1805,

HYSTERICAL FANCIES, 197

paranoiacs are of the same nature, they are fancies which directly
become conscious, and which are borne by the masochistic-sadistic
components of the sexual impulse. Complete counterparts of
these can also be found in certain unconscious fancies of hysterics.
It is a familiar, practically significant fact that hysterics express
their fancies not as symptoms but in conscious realzation, and in
this way they feign and commit murders, assaults, and sexual ag-
gressions,

All that can be found out about the sexuality of the psychoneu-
rotic can be ascertained by the psychoanalytic examination which
leads from the obtrusive symptoms to the hidden unconscious
tancies ; herein, too, is the fact, the communication of which will
be put in the foreground of this short preliminary publication.

Probably in view of the difficulties which prevent the effort of
the unconscious fancies from expressing themselves, the relation
between the fancies to the symptoms is not simple but rather
manifoldly complicated.® As a rule, that is, in a fully developed
and a long standing neurosis, a symptom does not correspond to
an individual unconscious fancy, but to a number of such, and
indeed it is not arbitrary but in lawful combination. To be sure
in the beginning of the disease all these complications are not
developed.

For the sake of general interest I pass over the connection of
this communication and insert a series of formulz which strive to
progressively exhaust the nature of hysteria. They do not con-
tradict one another but correspond partly to more complete and
sharper conceptions, and partly to the use of different points of
view.

1. The hysterical symptom is the memory symbol of certain
efficacious (traumatic) impressions and experiences.

2. The hysterical symptom is the compensation by conversion
for the associative return of the traumatic experience.

3. The hysterical symptom—like all other psychic formations—
is the expression of a wish realization.

4. The hysterical symptom is the realization of an unconscious
fancy serving as a wish fulfilment.

°The same thing holds true for the relation between the “latent”
thoughts of the dream and the elements of the manifest content of the
dream, See the Chapter on the “Work of the Dream” in the author’s
Traumdeutung.

198 PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES,

5. The hysterical symptom serves as a sexual gratification, and
Tepresents a part of the sexual life of the individual (correspond-
ing to one of the components of his sexual impulse).

6. The hysterical symptom, in a fashion, corresponds to the
return of the sexual gratification which was real in infantile life
but had been repressed since then.

7. The hysterical symptom results as a compromse between two
opposing affects or impulse incitements, one of which strives to
bring to realization a Partial impulse, or a component of the
sexual constitution, while the other strives to suppress the same,

8. The hysterical symptom may undertake the representation
of diverse unconscious non sexual incitements, but can not Jack
the sexual significance,

It is the seventh among these determinations which expresses
most exhaustively the essence of the hysterical symptom as a real-
ization of an unconscious fancy, and it is the eighth which prop-
erly designates the significance of the sexual moment. Some of
the preceding formulz are contained as first steps in this formula,

In view of these relations between symptoms and fancies one
can readily reach from the Psychoanalysis of the symptoms to the
knowledge of the components of the sexual impulse controlling
the individual, just as I have shown in the “Three Contributions
to the Sexual Theory.” But in some cases this examination
gives rather unexpected results. It shows that many symptoms

I refrain from giving examples for this axiom. Experience
has taught me that short analyses compressed into the form of an
abstract can never make the demonstrable impression for which
they were intended, The communication of fully analyzed cases
must be reserved for another place.

HYSTERICAL FANCIES. 199

I therefore content myself in formulating the axiom and in
elucidating its significance:

9. An hysterical symptom is the expression, on the one hand,
of a masculine, and on the other hand of a feminine unconscious
sexual fancy.

I expressly observe that I am unable to adjudge to this axiom
the similar general validity that I claimed for the other formule.
‘As far as I can see it is met neither in all symptoms of a single
case, nor in all cases. On the contrary it is not difficult to find
cases in which the contrary sexual emotions have found separate
symptomatic expression, so that the symptoms of hetero- and
homosexuality can be as sharply distinguished from each other as
the fancies hidden behind them. Nevertheless, the relation
claimed in the ninth formula occurs frequently enough, and
wherever it is found it is of sufficient significance to merit a
special formulation. It seems to me to signify the highest stage
of complexity to which the determination of hysterical symptoms
can reach, and can only be expected in a long standing neurosis
and where a great amount of organization has occurred.”

The demonstrable bisexual significance of hysterical symptoms
occurring in many cases is indeed an interesting proof for the
assertion formulated by me that the supposed bisexual predisposi-
tion of man can be especially recognized in psychoneurotics by
means of psychoanalysis. Quite an analogous process from the
same sphere is that in which the masturbator in his conscious
fancies attempts to live through in his imagination the fancied
situations of both the man and the woman. Other counterparts
are found in certain hysterical crises in which the patients play
both réles lying at the basis of sexual fancies; thus, for example,
‘one of the cases under my observation presses his garments to his
body with one arm (as woman), and with the other arm he at-
tempts to tear them off (as man). This contradictory simul-
taneity determines most of the incomprehensibility of the situa-
tion otherwise so plastically represented in the attack, and is ex-

‘Indeed J. Sadger, who recently discovered this sentence in question,
independently by psychoanalysis, claims for it a general validity (Die
Bedeutung der psychoanalytische Methode nach Freud, Zentralbl. i. Nerv.
u. Psych., Nr. 229.

*’Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory.

200 PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES

cellently suited for the concealment of the effective unconscious
fancy.

In psychoanalytical treatment it is very important to be pre-
pared for the bisexual significance of a symptom. It should
not be at all surprising or misleading when a symptom remains
apparently undiminished in spite of the fact that one of its
sexual determinants is already solved. Perhaps it is still sup-
ported by the unsuspected contrary sexual. Furthermore, dur-
ing the treatment of such cases we can observe how the patient
makes use of this convenience. During the analysis of the one
sexual significance he continually switches his thoughts into the

sphere of the contrary significance just as if onto a neighboring
track.