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She had been married for three months. Her husband, a traveling salesman, had had to leave her a few weeks after their marriage and had 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 sick in her abdomen and stomach, her head swam, she had feelings of oppression and anxiety and cardiac paresthesias;1
she thought she was going mad. A moment later it occurred to her that she had eaten eggs and mushrooms that morning, so she thought she had been poisoned. However, the condition quickly passed. 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 the obsession, accompanied by anxiety, that she too was going to go mad.
The argument runs as follows: I begin with the assumption that her condition at that time had been an anxiety attack — a release of sexual feeling that was transformed into anxiety. An attack of that kind, I am afraid, might take place without any accompanying psychic process. Nevertheless, I do not want to reject the more encouraging possibility that such a process might be found; on the contrary, I take it as the starting point of my work. What I expected was this: she had a longing for her husband — that is, for sexual relations with him; she thus came upon an idea that excited sexual affect followed later by defense; she took fright and made a false connection or substitution.
I began by asking her about the circumstances surrounding the event: something must have reminded her of her husband. She had been singing Carmen's aria “Près des remparts de Séville.”2 I asked her to repeat it for me; she did not even know the words exactly. — At what point do you think the attack came on? — She did not know. — When I applied pressure [to her forehead], she said [it had been] after she had finished the aria. That seemed quite