217. Miss Lucy R., the heroine of the first case, was an English governess in the family of a German manufacturer. She was thirty years of age, in perfect health, except for a local inflammation of the nose. It is interesting to note that this local trouble probably suggested the special sense on which a hallucination could most readily fix itself.

The symptom for which Miss R. consulted Dr. Freud was, in fact, a persistent hallucinatory smell of burnt pudding. Careful inquiry traced the origin of this smell to a scene when the children under her charge, affectionately sporting with her, had allowed some pudding which was on the schoolroom fire to burn. It was not obvious why this incident should have carried so much emotional import. Gradually the truth came out, a truth which Miss R. - and this is an essential point - had concealed from herself with all the resolution of which she was capable. She had unconsciously fallen in love with her employer, a widower, whose children she had promised their dying mother to care for always. The scene of the burnt pudding represented a moment at which an obscure scruple of conscience urged her to quit her trust, to leave these children, who were now devoted to her, on account of something dimly felt to be unsuitable in her own attitude of mind towards their father. When once this confession had been made - a confession new to herself as well as to the physician - the hallucinatory smell of burnt pudding disappeared.

Its persistence had indicated that the emotional memory on which it was based had not, so to say, been absorbed into the general psychical circulation, but had remained encysted in the personality, a cause of pressure and distress.

But now occurred a symptom which to a less skilful or patient observer would have seemed merely baffling and capricious, but from which Dr. Freud drew a psychological lesson which illustrates with curious delicacy the superposition of strata more and more segregated from waking consciousness.

As the scent of burnt pudding went off it became clear that another scent had underlain it, which still persisted - a scent of tobacco-smoke. It seemed impossible to trace the moment of origin of so everyday an odour. But by strong suggestions in a waking or lightly hypnotised state, - placing his hand on the patient's forehead, - Dr. Freud was able to evoke a stream of pictorial memory, closely analogous to crystal-vision. He called upon her to picture thus the scene required. Then slowly and fragmentarily "a picture rises to the surface " (auftaucht). But it represents only the dining-room of her employer's house, where she is waiting with the children for his return to early dinner from the manufactory. "And now," she says, "we are all sitting down at table - the gentlemen, the French governess, the housekeeper, the children, and I. But this is just an everyday scene! " "Go on looking at the picture," replies Dr. Freud, " it will develop and specialise itself." " I see that there is a guest, the head cashier, an old gentleman who loves the children like an uncle; but he comes so often to dinner that there is nothing unusual in his presence." " Patience! go on looking at the picture; I am sure that something will happen." " Nothing particular happens.

Now we are rising from table; the children are leaving the room, and are going into the next room with the French governess and myself as they always do." "Well, what next?" "Ah! here is an unusual circumstance, and now I recognise the scene completely! As the children leave the room the cashier makes as though to kiss them. The father jumps up and calls out roughly, 'Don't kiss the children!' I feel a kind of stab in my heart. The gentlemen are smoking; hence it is that the smell of cigars remains fixed in my memory".

The point is easy to understand. It was this harshness, pride, aloofness in the nature of the manufacturer, who treated thus roughly a subordinate who was also an old friend, which burnt itself upon the brain, as we say, of this other subordinate who had obscurely hoped that her employer had a gentler and more accessible heart. She put aside the painful impression; but the thought which was kept out of the supraliminal lodged in the hypnotic stratum.

The way to minister to a mind thus diseased was not hard to discover. There was nothing in this deep-hidden affection which was unworthy of a pure heart. There was only the maidenly shame at having, however secretly, entertained it for one who was above her in worldly fortune, and who was not prepared to respond. By sympathy, by suggestion, the tone of the affection was changed. "Gewiss, ich liebe ihn, aber das macht mir weiter nichts. Man kann ja bei sich denken und empfinden was man will." With the disappearance of all personal claim or hope the love ceased to perturb, and the patient recovered health and spirits.

218. Still more remarkable was the case of Fraulein Anna O., of which a brief record must now be given. Dr. Breuer asserts, and the details of the story support his view, that Fräulein O. was greatly above the average standard in character, education, and physical vigour. There was here no misère psychologique, no thinness or feebleness in the original structure of the personality. Fräulein O. led an active and happy life; her strongest attachment was to her father. Her thoughts did not dwell on love or marriage (in the whole range of her hallucinations and delirium there was no trace of this), but she had great imaginative activity in day-dreams, the invention of stories, and the like.

The cause of her break-down lay in a long, distressing, and ultimately fatal illness of her father's (1880 - 81) when she was twenty-one years old. She nursed him with a passionate self-devotion, which was, no doubt, unwise, but which can hardly be called morbid. Her nervous system gave way, and a quantity of hysterical affections set in. There were headaches, strabismus, disturbances of sight and of speech, positive and negative hallucinations, the influence of idèees fixes, contractions, anaesthesiæ, etc. The condition of extreme instability thus induced, varying from hour to hour, gave rise at times to a secondary personality which lay outside the primary memory. We thus have a very direct transition from isolated disturbances to a cleavage of the whole personality.

Disturbances of speech may give very delicate indications of internal turmoil of the personality; and Fräulein O.'s great linguistic gift made her perhaps the most interesting example on record of hysterical aphasia and paraphasia. Sometimes she was altogether speechless. Sometimes she talked German in the ungrammatical, negro-like fashion which so often accompanies trance or secondary states; - well indicating, in my view, the incoherent character of the then operative control. Sometimes she spoke English, apparently believing it to be German, but understood German; sometimes she spoke English and could not understand German. (The English phrases of hers which Dr. Breuer quotes are, be it noted, remarkably neat and well chosen.) Sometimes she spoke French or Italian; and in French or Italian states she had no memory of English states, and vice versâ. Sometimes, however, in an English state she could understand French or Italian books; but if she read them aloud she read them in English, apparently unaware that they were not in that language.

The origin of this tendency to English was afterwards explained in the hypnotic state. Each of the specific hysterical symptoms took its rise from some incident which had happened in hours of anxious anguish by her father's bedside. In an hour of bewildered exhaustion she had suffered from a kind of half-waking nightmare, had striven to pray, could find no words, and had at last remembered only a line from an English child's hymn. This effort, with this casual result, seemed to have given a persistent suggestion of English speech, in a manner somewhat reminding us of the phrase which has been last uttered before aphasia sets in, and which often persists for the aphasic as his single utterance. Throughout the year 1881 these symptoms continued, and as the time of year came round when she was first taken ill, a singular time-hallucination sprang up. This was, in fact, a duplex existence at two dates, reminding us of Louis Vive (see Section 233) and some other hysterics who can be set back by artifice to a former period of their lives.

Healthy hypnotic subjects, as I have seen, can sometimes be thus transported backwards, although in a less profound manner.