es her in school, in
spite of her teaching only girls in a private institution. This
thought keeps her away from company and the effect of its
embarrassing occurrence depresses her, but she is sure that the
thought itself does not include any emotion. It is a mere thinking
of it with a full consciousness that it is absurd, and yet she
cannot suppress it.

I began at once to try to find the origin of her queer obsession.
After some efforts to pierce into her memories, we came to an
experience of her youth. When she was about thirteen years of age,
a young girl whom she had admired much for her beauty, living in
the neighborhood of her parents, suddenly got a child which died
after a few days. At that time no thought of immorality seems to
have entered into that news. It was evidently mere sadness about
the quick death of the child which gave to the experience its
emotional tone. She was at that time completely naive. She received
an intense shock in the thought that an unmarried girl may suddenly
get a child which would then quickly die. She cannot tell whether
the thought that she herself would get a child had ever entered her
mind before this occurrence in her neighborhood, nor can she say
that it occurred immediately or very soon after it. She now knows
only that she has always had that thought, but whether that means
more than ten years, she does not know.

I considered it a justifiable hypothesis that this strong emotional
experience early in life had become the starting point for that
secondary absurd thought. I considered that primary experience as
cause for a deep physiological brain excitement which had
irradiated towards the ideas of her personality. It had stirred up
there associations which kept their psychological character while
the primary disturbance had long lost its psychical accompaniment.
It worked its mischief in a physiological sphere but was probably
still the starting point for the persistent obsession. My aim was
to remove this cause. It would have brought little improvement
simply to suppress the freak idea as long as that physiological
source was active. On the other hand I should not have the means to
stop the physiological after-effects of that real experience: I had
to sidetrack it and to secure thus a reduction.