book on hysteria, in 1895. But there
followed a further development which is still more essential. The
hysterical disturbance may indeed have started with such an accidental
traumatic impression but that does not explain why just this impression
had such a strong effect. Other impressions of equal strength and
emotional vividness may have passed without leaving any damaging result.
And therefore there must be some prior cause in the subject which makes
just this particular impression so injurious; and here is the point of
Freud's fundamental discovery, which for the layman appears on the
surface to have little probability but which has proved of greatest
consequence for clinical work. It was found that only those situations
become injurious and become starting points for hysterical symptoms
which touch on repressed and artificially inhibited ideas of the sexual
sphere.

Entirely new perspectives have been opened by these studies. Above all,
now for the first time there is in sight a psychotherapy which not only
aims to remove symptoms but which really uproots the disease itself.
That earlier method of bringing the trauma to consciousness and making
it discharge, the so-called cathartic method, removes only the
particular group of disturbances but the patient remains a hysteric, and
if ever new accidents should happen which would touch again those inmost
repressed ideas, new hysterical symptoms would develop. But if we can go
back to that starting point, if we can discover those first suppressions
of desired gratifications which often most indirectly are related to the
sexual sphere, and if we can liberate the mind from those primary
strangulated affections, then the patient is really cured. Freud himself
practically abstained from the help which hypnotism can give for the
reawakening of forgotten experiences, while some of his pupils still
prefer this short way to the forgotten memories. His way is, on the
whole, to let the imagination bring up any chance material of associated
ideas and then to study their connections and follow the hints they
give. He calls it the psychoanalytic method. Others prefer the methods
of association tests, again others tap the lower layers by automatic
writing, but the chief problem remains always to discover those
repressed desires and to understand through them the injurious effects
of accidental experiences. The whole field of hysteria, and perhaps
still more that of the anxiety neurosis