Draft J2 Frau P. J. (Aged 27) from Extracts From The Fliess Papers

She had been married for three months. Her husband, a commercial traveller, had had to leave her a few weeks after

their marriage and had already been away for weeks on end. She missed him very much and longed for him. She had been a singer, or at any rate had been trained as one. To pass the time, she was sitting at the piano singing, when suddenly she felt ill-in her abdomen and stomach, her head swam, she had feelings of oppression and anxiety and cardiac paraesthesia; she thought she was going mad. A moment later it occurred to her that she had eaten eggs and mushrooms that morning, and concluded that she had been poisoned. However, the condition quickly passed off. Next day the maidservant told her that a woman living in the same house had gone mad. From that time on she was never free of an obsession, accompanied by anxiety, that she was going to go mad too.

Such is the outline of the case. I assumed to start with that her condition then had been an anxiety attack-a release of sexual feeling which was transformed into anxiety. An attack of that kind, I was afraid, might take place without any accompanying psychical process. Nevertheless, I would not reject the more favourable possibility that such a process might be found; on the contrary, I would take it as the starting-point of my work. What I expected to find was this. She had had a longing for her husband-that is, for sexual relations with him; she had thus come upon an idea which had excited sexual affect and afterwards defence against the idea; she had then taken fright and made a false connection or substitution.1

I began by asking her about the subsidiary circumstances of the event: something must have reminded her of her husband. She had been singing Carmen's aria ‘Prés des remparts de Séville’.2 I asked her to repeat it for me; she could not even recall the words exactly.—At what point do you think the attack came on?-She did not know.