In view of the far-reaching significance of such an hypothesis it pays to enter somewhat more fully into the classical analysis of Freud.
It was the case of a thirty-year old woman who manifested the following symptoms: She imagined that her environment had changed, she was no longer respected, she was annoyed, she was watched, and her thoughts were known. Later she thought that she was watched in the evening while undressing. She also experienced sensations in her abdomen which she believed were occasioned by an unseemly thought on the part of the servant girl. Visions then appeared in which she saw female and male genitals. Whenever she was with women alone she had hallucinations of female genitals, and at the same time imagined that the others saw her own genitals.
Freud analyzed this case. He observed that this patient behaved just like a hysteric; that is, she showed the same resistances, etc. What seemed unusual was the fact that the repressed thoughts did not appear, as in hysteria, in the form of loosely connected fancies, but in the form of hallucinations, and hence the patient compared them to her own voice. (I shall later take the opportunity to produce experimental proof for this observation.) The hallucinations here mentioned began to manifest themselves after the patient saw in the asylum a number of naked female patients bathing together. "It may be presupposed that the reason these impressions repeated themselves was because something of great interest was connected with them." She stated that she felt ashamed in the presence of these women. This is somewhat forced and altruistic modesty was striking, and pointed to something repressed. Patient reproduced "a series of scenes from her seventeenth to her eighth year, during which, while bathing before her mother, her sister and her physician, she was ashamed of her nakedness. This series, however, reached back to a scene in her sixth year, when she undressed in the children's room before going to sleep without feeling ashamed of her brother, who was present. Finally it was found that for years the brothers and sisters were in the habit of showing themselves naked to one another before retiring." At that time she was not ashamed. "She is now trying to make up in shame what she lost as a child."
