Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/118

104 cathartic method, I would now like to add a few indications showing how one makes an analysis with technique. For me this is a very interesting theme, but I do not expect that it will excite similar interest in others who have not practiced such analyses. Properly speaking we shall again deal with the technique, but this time with those difficulties concerning which the patient cannot be held responsible, and which must in part be the same in a hypnoid and a retention hysteria as well as in the defense hysteria which I have in mind as a model. I start on this last fragment of discussion with the expectation that the psychic peculiarities revealed here might sometimes attain a certain value as raw material for an intellectual dynamics.

The first and strongest impression which one gains through such an analysis is surely the fact that the pathogenic psychic material, apparently forgotten and not at the disposal of the ego, playing no role in the association and in memory, still lies ready in some manner and in proper and good order. All that is necessary is to remove the resistances blocking the way. Barring that, everything is known as we know anything else, the proper connections of the individual ideas among themselves and with the nonpathogenic are frequently recalled and are present; they have been produced in their time and retained in memory. The pathogenic psychic material appears as the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to the normal ego. The semblance of a second personality is often most delusively produced. Whether this impression is justified, whether the arrangements of the psychic material resulting after the adjustment is not transferred back into the time of the disease, these are questions which I do not like to consider in this place. One cannot easily and intuitively describe the experiences resulting from these analyses as if he placed himself in the position, which one can only take a survey of after their disappearance.

The condition is usually not so simple as one represents it in special cases, as, for example, in a single case in which a symptom originates through a serious trauma. We frequently deal not with a single hysterical symptom but with a number of the same which are partially independent of one another and partially connected. We must not expect a single traumatic reminiscence whose nucleus is a single pathogenic idea, but we must be ready to assume