pretation and is sometimes pure fantasy.
Freud now attaches great importance to dreams as symbolically representing
much in the subject's mental history which is otherwise difficult to
reach.[275] The subtle and slender clues which Freud frequently follows in
interpreting dreams cannot fail sometimes to arouse doubt in his readers'
minds, but he certainly seems to have been often successful in thus
reaching latent facts in consciousness. The primary lesion may thus act as
"a foreign body in consciousness." Something is introduced into psychic
life which refuses to merge in the general flow of consciousness. It
cannot be accepted simply as other facts of life are accepted; it cannot
even be talked about, and so submitted to the slow usure by which our
experiences are worn down and gradually transformed. Breuer illustrates
what happens by reference to the sneezing reflex. "When an irritation to
the nasal mucous membrane for some reason fails to liberate this reflex,
a feeling of excitement and tension arises. This excitement, being unable
to stream out along motor channels, now spreads itself over the brain,
inhibiting other activities.... _In the highest spheres of human activity
we may watch the same process_." It is a result of this process that, as
Breuer and Freud found, the mere act of confession may greatly relieve the
hysterical symptoms produced by this psychic mechanism, and in some cases
may wholly and permanently remove them. It is on this fact that they
founded their method of treatment, devised by Breuer and by him termed the
cathartic method, though Freud prefers to call it the "analytic" method.
It is, as Freud points out, the reverse of the hypnotic method of
suggestive treatment; there is the same difference, Freud remarks, between
the two methods as Leonardo da Vinci found for the two technical methods
of art, _per via di porre_ and _per via di levare_; the hypnotic method,
like painting, works by putting in, the cathartic or analytic method, like
sculpture, works by taking out.[276]

It is part of the mechanism of this process, as understood by these
authors, that the physical symptoms of hysteria are constituted, by a
process of conversion, out of the injured emotions, which then sink into
the background or altogether out of consciousness. Thus, they found the
prolonged tension of nursing a near and dear relative to be a very
frequent factor in the production of hysteria. For instance, an originally
rh