eumatic pain experienced by a daughter when nursing her father becomes
the symbol in memory of her painful psychic excitement, and this perhaps
for several reasons, but chiefly because _its presence in consciousness
almost exactly coincided with that excitement_. In another way, again,
nausea and vomiting may become a symbol through the profound sense of
disgust with which some emotional shock was associated. Then the symbol
begins to have a life of its own, and draws hidden strength from the
emotion with which it is correlated. Breuer and Freud have found by
careful investigation that the pains and physical troubles of hysteria are
far from being capricious, but may be traced in a varying manner to an
origin in some incident, some pain, some action, which was associated with
a moment of acute psychic agony. The process of conversion was an
involuntary escape from an intolerable emotion, comparable to the physical
pain sometimes sought in intense mental grief, and the patient wins some
relief from the tortured emotions, though at the cost of psychic
abnormality, of a more or less divided state of consciousness and of
physical pain, or else anaesthesia. In Charcot's third stage of the
hysterical convulsion, that of "_attitudes passionnelles_," Breuer and
Freud see the hallucinatory reproduction of a recollection which is full
of significance for the origin of the hysterical manifestations.

The final result reached by these workers is clearly stated by each
writer. "The main observation of our predecessors," states Breuer,[277]
"still preserved in the word 'hysteria,' is nearer to the truth than the
more recent view which puts sexuality almost in the last line, with the
object of protecting the patient from moral reproaches. Certainly the
sexual needs of the hysterical are just as individual and as various in
force as those of the healthy. But they suffer from them, and in large
measure, indeed, they suffer precisely through the struggle with them,
through the effort to thrust sexuality aside." "The weightiest fact,"
concludes Freud,[278] "on which we strike in a thorough pursuit of the
analysis is this: From whatever side and from whatever symptoms we start,
we always unfailingly reach the region of the sexual life. Here, first of
all, an etiological condition of hysterical states is revealed.... At the
bottom of every case of hysteria--and reproducible by an analytical effort
after even an interval of long years--may be