n the sexual life of so-called psychoneurotics (hysteria, obsessions,
the wrongly-named neurasthenia, and surely also dementia praecox, and
paranoia), and that is by subjecting them to the psychoanalytic
investigations propounded by J. Breuer and myself in 1893, which we
called the "cathartic" treatment.

I must repeat what I have said in my published work, that these
psychoneuroses, as far as my experience goes, are based on sexual motive
powers. I do not mean that the energy of the sexual impulse merely
contributes to the forces supporting the morbid manifestations
(symptoms), but I wish distinctly to maintain that this supplies the
only constant and the most important source of energy in the neurosis,
so that the sexual life of such persons manifests itself either
exclusively, preponderately, or partially in these symptoms. As I have
already stated in different places, the symptoms are the sexual
activities of the patient. The proof for this assertion I have obtained
from the psychoanalysis of hysterics and other neurotics during a period
of twenty years, the results of which I hope to give later in a detailed
account.

Psychoanalysis removes the symptoms of hysteria on the supposition that
they are the substitutes--the transcriptions as it were--for a series of
emotionally accentuated psychic processes, wishes, and desires, to which
a passage for their discharge through the conscious psychic activities
has been cut off by a special process (repression). These thought
formations which are restrained in the state of the unconscious strive
for expression, that is, for _discharge_, in conformity to their
affective value, and find such in hysteria through a process of
_conversion_ into somatic phenomena--the hysterical symptoms. If, _lege
artis_, and with the aid of a special technique, retrogressive
transformations of the symptoms into the affectful and conscious
thoughts can be effected, it then becomes possible to get the most
accurate information about the nature and origin of these previously
unconscious psychic formations.

*Results of Psychoanalysis.*--In this manner it has been discovered that
the symptoms represent the equivalent for the strivings which received
their strength from the source of the sexual impulse. This fully concurs
with what we know of the character of hysterics, which we have taken as
models for all psycho-neurotics, before they have become diseased, and
with what we know concerning the ca