Ashlie Cormier May 7, 2012 Gender & Psychoanalysis Essay #4 A Sense of Symptoms In Freuds Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he discusses

the sense of symptoms in which people that suffer from obsessional neurosis tend to show. What today we would consider to be OCD, Freud attempts to explain is just a part of their brain illness and not necessarily a way to classify the person as a whole. Freud explains that people with obsessional neurosis can seem quite normal, and their acts as well can sometimes seem of nothing extraordinary at first. However there are certain symptoms that these patients have that make you question whether or not some of their actions are completely normal. It is these symptoms, Freud points out, that give you an idea that something abnormal in the persons neurosis. However Freud wants people to know that obsessional neurosis is not illogical, that all of these symptoms make sense in a bigger picture. He states that the symptoms are a representation, a repetition, of the significant scene. With the two cases he presents he shows that both of these girls experiences with obsessional behavior can be interpreted the way a dreamthought can, and is related to something from their childhood and/or a very powerful experience in their life. In other words, it is very similar to the wish fulfillments in dream-thoughts. For example the first case, the woman kept repeating this act of sitting at the table, calling the maid, and returning to the bedroom because she was trying to correct the actions of an experience that bothered her. Its as if this were a dream that became a part of her conscious and she was repeating this dream over and over with hope of fulfilling the wish to fix a past experience. Freud says that a majority of the time these incidents relate back to childhood memories but no all the time. The sense

of a symptom lies, as we have found, in some connection with the patients experience. Freud concludes that obsessional neurosis is something with symptoms that we can break down and interpret and make sense out of because the people being affected by this illness are not completely ill but just affected more severely by certain infantile experiences.