In first days of May of 1897, after returning from a trip to Nuremberg, Freud sent four letters with extensive notes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. In these notes, entitled The Architecture of Hysteria, Freud laid out what he, drawing on architectural metaphor, called the structure of He likened projected fantasies to defensive structures (Schutzbauten) and outworks (Vorbauten) that prevent access to memories of primal scenes. Impressed by Nuremberg's medieval architecture, Freud drawing a parallel between city's fortifications and hysterical symptoms. In second installment of notes, which Freud mailed to Fliess on May 25, he added a diagram of disease that looks like a sketch of Nuremberg towers (Architecture 203).Aside from spatialization of hysteria implied in notion of structure, what I find most interesting in Freud's recourse to architecture is temporal background of metaphor. His inspiration in an architecture as densely historical as that of Nuremberg is well suited to a definition of hysteria that seeks to account for layers of experience concealed by symptoms.Nuremberg's architecture, explains William McGrath, translates into form contest between city's ruling lord, Burggraf, and middle class. In 1377 citizenry erected a tower on eastern wall to spy on activities in Burggraf's fortress. Later, descendants of responded in kind, and in fifteenth century his fortress was equipped with a peaked roof and wooden balconies which allowed his men to keep watch on city while city's men on their lookout were watching Burggraf (McGrath 192-94). In Freud's diagram, those peaked roofs represent hysterical fantasy, an apparently static structure arising out of a dynamic power struggle.The reader will have guessed that I am about to relate this bit of Freudian lore to famous description of Cathedral tower in opening scene of La Regenta. I am not advancing a Freudian reading of this great novel, nor am I about to restate, for umpteenth time, pseudo-Freudian wisdom that Vetusta's tower is a phallic symbol, among other reasons because symbols gather their significance from their contexts. And it is far from clear that Clarin's description of Vetusta's municipal geography transcribes Magistral's repressed sexual desire.Freud's recourse to towers of Nuremberg to theorize a psychic malady that taxing doctors' ingenuity in last decades of nineteenth century is useful for other reasons. One of these reasons is that his architectural metaphor refers psychic conflict to a historical clash that appears congealed in architectural form. It is no coincidence that Freud inspired by medieval architecture. As a Jewish scientist living in an increasingly anti-Semitic Vienna, he shared Jean-Martin Charcot's view that medieval religious culture cause of widespread hysterical manifestations (McGrath 196). So, despite Charcot's oft-quoted c'est toujours la chose genitale, a phrase often cited in ignorance that it reported by Freud (History 48), young Freud introduced a dimension of social struggle in his description of psychic mechanism of hysteria. This dimension identified social struggle with power of vision. To see, to penetrate alien secrets is to master owners of those secrets. To resist, to obstruct searching gaze, to retreat from scrutiny and to camouflage behind symptoms is strength out of weakness deployed in hysteria, an elusive or, as English doctor Thomas Sydenham had called it (qtd. in Janet 18), a Proteus, an ever-changing disease.From its inception, La Regenta focuses on this type of conflict. Like Nuremberg's towers in Freud's diagram, Vetusta's tower is both a symptom of a hidden morbidity and place from which secrets are intruded upon. Up there, Magistral sees himself as el amo espiritual de la provincia (I: 462). …