found one or more facts of
precocious sexual experience belonging to earliest youth. I regard this as
an important result, as the discovery of a _caput Nili_ of
neuropathology." Ten years later, enlarging rather than restricting his
conception, Freud remarks: "Sexuality is not a mere _deus ex machina_
which intervenes but once in the hysterical process; it is the motive
force of every separate symptom and every expression of a symptom. The
morbid phenomena constitute, to speak plainly, the patient's sexual
activity."[279] The actual hysterical fit, Freud now states, may be
regarded as "the substitute for a once practiced and then abandoned
_auto-erotic_ satisfaction," and similarly it may be regarded as an
equivalent of coitus.[280]

It is natural to ask how this conception affects that elaborate picture of
hysteria laboriously achieved by Charcot and his school. It cannot be said
that it abolishes any of the positive results reached by Charcot, but it
certainly alters their significance and value; it presents them in a new
light and changes the whole perspective. With his passion for getting at
tangible definite physical facts, Charcot was on very safe ground. But he
was content to neglect the psychic analysis of hysteria, while yet
proclaiming that hysteria is a purely psychic disorder. He had no cause of
hysteria to present save only heredity. Freud certainly admits heredity,
but, as he points out, the part it plays has been overrated. It is too
vague and general to carry us far, and when a specific and definite cause
can be found, the part played by heredity recedes to become merely a
condition, the soil on which the "specific etiology" works. Here probably
Freud's enthusiasm at first carried him too far and the most important
modification he has made in his views occurs at this point: he now
attaches a preponderant influence to heredity. He has realized that sexual
activity in one form or another is far too common in childhood to make it
possible to lay very great emphasis on "traumatic lesions" of this
character, and he has also realized that an outcrop of fantasies may
somewhat later develop on these childish activities, intervening between
them and the subsequent morbid symptoms. He is thus led to emphasize anew
the significance of heredity, not, however, in Charcot's sense, as general
neuropathic disposition but as "sexual constitution." The significance of
"infantile sexual lesions" has also tended to give plac