llustration is furnished in a case, recorded by
Breuer, in which a young girl of seventeen had her first hysterical attack
after a cat sprang on her shoulders as she was going downstairs. Careful
investigation showed that this girl had been the object of somewhat ardent
attentions from a young man whose advances she had resisted, although her
own sexual emotions had been aroused. A few days before, she had been
surprised by this young man on these same dark stairs, and had forcibly
escaped from his hands. Here was the real psychic traumatism, the
operation of which merely became manifest in the cat. "But in how many
cases," asks Breuer, "is a cat thus reckoned as a completely sufficient
_causa efficiens_?"

In every case that they have investigated Breuer and Freud have found some
similar secret lesion of the psychic sexual sphere. In one case a
governess, whose training has been severely upright, is, in spite of
herself and without any encouragement, led to experience for the father of
the children under her care an affection which she refuses to acknowledge
even to herself; in another, a young woman finds herself falling in love
with her brother-in-law; again, an innocent girl suddenly discovers her
uncle in the act of sexual intercourse with her playmate, and a boy on his
way home from school is subjected to the coarse advances of a sexual
invert. In nearly every case, as Freud eventually found reason to believe,
a primary lesion of the sexual emotions dates from the period of puberty
and frequently of childhood, and in nearly every case the intimately
private nature of the lesion causes it to be carefully hidden from
everyone, and even to be unacknowledged by the subject of it. In the
earlier cases Breuer and Freud found that a slight degree of hypnosis is
necessary to bring the lesion into consciousness, and the accuracy of the
revelations thus obtained has been tested by independent witness. Freud
has, however, long abandoned the induction of any degree of hypnosis; he
simply tries to arrange that the patient shall feel absolutely free to
tell her own story, and so proceeds from the surface downwards, slowly
finding and piecing together such essential fragments of the history as
may be recovered, in the same way he remarks, as the archaeologist
excavates below the surface and recovers and puts together the fragments
of an antique statue. Much of the material found, however, has only a
symbolic value requiring inter