A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

THE PUNISHMENT OF GOD

A BROKEN ARM FOR BROKEN FAITH

Mrs. Anna M. the wife of a soldier in the reserve accused Mrs. Clementine C. of being untrue to her husband. The accusation reads that Mrs. C. had carried on an illicit relationship with Karl M. while her own husband was on the battlefield, from which he even sent her 70 Kronen a month. Mrs. C. had received quite a lot of money from the husband of the plaintiff, while she and her children had to live in hunger and in misery. Friends of her husband had told her that Mrs. C. had visited inns with M. and had caroused there until late at night. The accused had even asked the husband of the plaintiff before several infantrymen whether he would not soon get a divorce from his "old woman" and live with her. Mrs. C.'s housekeeper had also repeatedly seen the husband of the plaintiff in her (Mrs. C.'s) apartment, in complete negligée.

Yesterday Mrs. C. denied before a judge in Leopoldstadt that she even knew M; there could be no question of intimate relation between them.

The witness, Albertine M., however, testified that Mrs. C. had kissed the husband of the plaintiff and that she had surprised them at it.

When M. was called as a witness in an earlier proceeding he had denied any intimate relation to the accused. Yesterday the judge received a letter in which the witness retracts the statement he made in the first proceeding and admits that he had carried on a love affair with Mrs. C., until last June. He says that he only denied this relationship in the former proceeding for the sake of the accused because before the proceeding she had come to him and begged on her knees that he should save her and not confess. "To-day," wrote the witness, "I felt impelled to make a full confession to the court, since I have broken my left arm and this appears to me as the punishment of God for my transgression."

The judge maintained the penal offense had already become null and void, whereupon the plaintiff withdrew her accusation and the liberation of the accused followed.

34

This highly technical concept is explained in The Interpretation of Dreams, Chap. VII, Sec. (b) pp. 422 et seq.

35

The principal street of Vienna.

36

I do not mention another obvious interpretation of this "3" in the case of this childless woman, because it is not material to this analysis.

37

Compare S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913.

38

E. Toulouse, Emile Zola —Enquête medico-psychologique, Paris, 1896.

39

There are fagots and fagots.