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This report refers to a case from the Viennese Psycho-Analytical Clinic which for internal and external reasons was not suitable for psycho-analysis. When hypnotism also failed Kohnstamm's palimnestic method was tried. The patient was a virgin of forty-seven who suffered from a psycho-genetic tic of the diaphragm and from obsessional symptoms
While she was under light hypnosis she was told to dream about certain subjects. The author was tempted 'to find out how far one could penetrate into the unconscious without a formal overcoming of the resistances'.
The result showed that for a doctor versed in psycho-analysis such penetration is certainly possible, but that there comes a point at which the resistances set up an insuperable barrier to these methods of investigation. Thus the patient responded to a demand that she should dream about the meaning of the tic in earlier days with a dream of symbolic defloration. When asked to dream of the cause of her periodical nervous insomnia, she had a dream in which a young man was playing the piano with a sister of hers. She herself became jealous, and wanted to play on her own piano, but the music was taken away from her. Following on this dream the patient's unconscious jealousy and desire to masturbate came into consciousness; she began to do so, and directly afterwards the tic stopped, which showed it to be a substitute for onanism. The further order to dream about the kind of onanism, and about her mother's prohibitions against onanism, still produced light on the patient's castration complex. She dreamed about herself as having 'mutilated hands' and as wearing 'a torn and bloody chemise', and thereupon produced conversion-symptoms in her arms and hands, which appeared to her 'as dead'. After this, however, any further understanding became impossible. The dream experiments ceased to yield useful results, and the resistances became impenetrable without the help of analysis. The author attributes this to the unr