Carmen and Her Brother: The Effect of Early and Prolonged Incestlike Experience on the Development and Analysis of a Self-Defeating Woman, with Reflections on the Analytic Process and its Scientific Nature

Certain individuals develop mental and even physical problems soon after they have a pleasurable experience; for example, when they feel happy after having achieved an important goal. Freud described this phenomenon in his paper “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (1916). He presented two cases: a young woman who had an abrupt regression and became seriously ill when she had achieved a success in love; and a young man who went to pieces upon achieving his long-held and central career goal. Again, in one of his last papers, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936), Freud describes how this sort of thing had once happened to him. He reminds the reader of his earlier paper and then offers details of his own similar experience of a paradoxical depression following the possibility of the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, to visit Athens, a visit which he almost inhibited himself from making, until, with some self-analysis, he overcame the inhibition and undertook the trip.