Studies in Hysteria

But man finds a substitute for this action in speech through which help the affect can well-nigh be ab-reacted

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

Every experience which produces the painful affect of fear, anxiety, shame, or of psychic pain may act as a trauma.

but by the psychic states with which the corresponding experiences in the patient have united.

The active etiological factor in traumatic neurosis is really not the insignificant bodily injury, but the affect of the fright; that is, the psychic trauma.

For it was really shown that these memories correspond to traumas which were not sufficiently 'ab-reacted,' and on closer investigation of the reasons for this hindrance, we can find at least two series of determinants through which the reaction to the trauma was omitted.

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."

A normal person is in this way capable of dissipating the accompanying affect by means of association.

Frequently a sort of equilibrium is then established between the psychic groups which are united in the same person; attack and normal life go hand in hand without influencing each other. The attack then comes spontaneously just as memories are wont to come, but just like memories it can also be provoked by the laws of association.