suspected that she became so ill on purpose so that she couldnt marry, enabling her to stay with her father, suggesting that she was fixated with a part of her past. This seems to make good sense of her behaviour but it has no empirical evidence, to support the interpretation of her behaviour, except one mans word, which is not enough, preventing this quite likely story from being confirmed. Another part of Freuds work, that offers a good story to make sense of behaviour, included using psychoanalysis on patients dreams to explain their meaning, often finding symbols of hidden needs, wishes and fears stored in the unconscious. One example of a dream that Freud psychoanalysed was a dream by a woman patient who lived with her sister. Her sister had two sons, Charles and Otto. The patient was courting a professor but the relationship ended and so she turned her affections to Otto, the son of her sister. She loved the little boy very much but one day he died. Following his death she dreamed that her sisters other son Charles died too. Freud asked her if she connected Otto's death with the professor. She answered yes, she said that she had not seen the professor for a very long time until he turned up at Otto's funeral to offer his condolences. Freud realised that if the other boy died too then the patient would have another chance to be reunited with the professor and interpreted the dream as a wish, that the she was fighting inwardly, to see him again. Freud suggested that a death scene was in fact the egos way of sneaking the erotic fulfilment of the wish past the super ego. He said that the last thing, consciously, a person would associate sexual yearning with would be a childs funeral and so it offered a brilliant disguise. This seems to be a very good, insightful interpretation but it is unscientific and there is no evidence to support it so that it can never be confirmed, even though it sounds like a story of the tru...
