s"
unless, despite all discomfort, he really enjoys them. A hard
statement to accept perhaps, but one that is repeatedly proved by a
specialist in "nerves"!

DETERMINING CAUSES

=Accidental Association.= In many cases, the form which the
sensitiveness takes is merely a matter of accident. Often it is based
on some small physical disability, as when a slight tendency to take
cold is magnified into an intense fear of fresh air.

Sometimes a past fleeting pain which has become associated with the
stream of thought of an emotional moment--what Boris Sidis calls the
moment-consciousness--is perpetuated in consciousness in place of the
repressed emotion. "In the determination of the pathology of hysteria,
the accidental moment plays a much greater part than is generally
recognized; if a painful affect--emotion--originates while eating but
is repressed, it may produce nausea and vomiting and continue for
months as an hysterical symptom."[60]

[Footnote 60: Freud: _Selected Papers_, p. 2.]

One of Freud's patients, Miss Rosalie H----, found while taking
singing-lessons that she often choked over notes of the middle
register, although she took with ease notes higher and lower in the
scale. It was revealed that this girl, who had a most unhappy home
life, had, during a former period, often experienced this choking
sensation from a painful emotion just before she went for her music
lesson. Some of the left-over sensations had remained during the
singing, and as the middle notes happen to involve the same muscles as
does a lump in one's throat, she had often found herself choking over
these notes. Later on, while living in a different city and in a
wholly different environment, the physical sensations from her throat
muscles, as they took these middle notes, brought back the associated
sensations of choking,--without, however, uncovering the buried
emotion.[61] Many a painful hysterical affliction is based on just
such mechanisms as these. As Freud remarks, "The hysteric suffers
mostly from reminiscences."[62]

[Footnote 61: Ibid, p. 43.]

[Footnote 62: Ibid, p. 5.]

=Subconscious Symbolism.= Sometimes, as we have seen, the form which
a hypersensitiveness assumes is not determined by any physical
sensation, either past or symbolism which acts out in the body the
drama of the soul.

=Facing the Facts.= Whatever the motives and whatever the determining
causes, hypersensibility is in any case a feeling of feelings which