Studies in Hysteria

Our tentative explanation refers to the third phase, the attitudes passionelles. Wherever it is prominent, it contains the hallucinatory reproduction of a memory which was significant for the hysterical onset.

On the contrary, we must maintain that the psychic trauma or the memory of the same acts like a foreign body which even long after its penetration must be considered as an agent of the present, the proof of which we see in a most remarkable phenomenon, which at the same time adds to our discoveries a distinctly practical interest.

Hence, we can say, that the reason why the pathogenically formed ideas retain their freshness and affective force is because they are not subject to the normal fading through abreaction and through reproduction in states of uninhibited association.

The psychic process, which originally elapsed, must be reproduced as vividly as possible so as to bring it back into the statum nascendi, and then thoroughly "talked out."

It abrogates the efficacy of the original non-abreacted ideas by affording an outlet to their strangulated affects through speech. It brings them to associative correction by drawing them into normal consciousness (in mild hypnosis) or by eliminating them through medical suggestion in the same way as in somnambulism with amnesia.

If the success of this reaction is of sufficient strength, it results in the disappearance of a great part of the affect.

Yet, whereas our dream psychoses do not influence our waking state, the products of hypnotic states are projected into the waking state, as hysterical phenomena.

individual hysterical symptoms immediately disappeared without returning if we succeeded in thoroughly awakening the memories of the causal process with its accompanying affect, and if the patient circumstantially discussed the process in the most detailed manner and gave verbal expression to the affect.

herein it seems to surpass the efficacy of direct suggestion, as practised at present by psychotherapists.