Studies in Hysteria

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.