ions--Fallacies Involved--Charcot's Attitude the Outcome of his
Personal Temperament--Breuer and Freud--Their Views Supplement and
Complete Charcot's--At the Same Time they Furnish a Justification for the
Earlier Doctrine of Hysteria--But They Must Not be Regarded as Final--The
Diffused Hysteroid Condition in Normal Persons--The Physiological Basis of
Hysteria--True Pathological Hysteria is Linked on to almost Normal States,
especially to Sex-hunger.

The nocturnal hallucinations of hysteria, as all careful students of this
condition now seem to agree, are closely allied to the hysterical attack
proper. Sollier, indeed, one of the ablest of the more recent
investigators of hysteria, has argued with much force that the subjects of
hysteria really live in a state of pathological sleep, of
vigilambulism.[251] He regards all the various accidents of hysteria as
having a common basis in disturbances of sensibility, in the widest sense
of the word "sensibility,"--as the very foundation of personality,--while
anaesthesia is "the real _sigillum hysteriae_." Whatever the form of
hysteria, we are thus only concerned with a more or less profound state of
vigilambulism: a state in which the subject seems, often even to himself,
to be more or less always asleep, whether the sleep may be regarded as
local or general. Sollier agrees with Fere that the disorder of
sensibility may be regarded as due to an exhaustion of the sensory centres
of the brain, whether as the result of constitutional cerebral weakness,
of the shock of a violent emotion, or of some toxic influence on the
cerebral cells.

We may, therefore, fitly turn from the auto-erotic phenomena of sleep
which in women generally, and especially in hysterical women, seem to
possess so much importance and significance, to the question--which has
been so divergently answered at different periods and by different
investigators--concerning the causation of hysteria, and especially
concerning its alleged connection with conscious or unconscious sexual
emotion.[252]

It was the belief of the ancient Greeks that hysteria came from the womb;
hence its name. We first find that statement in Plato's _Timaeus_: "In men
the organ of generation--becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal
disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust--seeks to gain
absolute sway; and the same is the case with the so-called womb, or
uterus, of women; the animal within them is desirous of