Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/119

Rh a series of partial traumas and a concatenation of pathogenic streams of thought. The monosymptomatic traumatic hysteria is, as it were, an elementary organism, it is a single being in comparison to the complicated structure of a grave hysterical neurosis as is generally encountered.

The psychic material of such hysteria presents itself as a multi-dimensional formation of at least triple stratification. I hope to be able to soon justify this figurative expression. First of all there is a nucleus of such reminiscences (either experiences or streams of thought) in which the traumatic moment culminated, or in which the pathogenic idea has found its purest formation. Around this nucleus we often find an incredibly rich mass of other memory material which we have to elaborate by the analysis in the triple arrangement mentioned before. In the first place, there is an unmistakable linear chronological arrangement which takes place within every individual theme. As an example of this I can only cite the arrangement in Breuer's analysis of Anna O. The theme is that of becoming deaf, of not hearing, which then becomes dififerentiated according to seven determinants, and under each heading there were from ten to one hundred single reminiscences in chronological order. It was as if one should take up an orderly kept record. In the analysis of my patient, Emmy v. N., there were similar if not so many memory. subdivisions; they formed quite a general event in every analysis. They always occurred in a chronological order which was as definitely reliable as the serial sequences of the days of the week or the names of the months in psychically normal individuals. They increased the work of the analysis through the peculiarity of reversing the series of their origin in the reproduction; the freshest and the most recent occurrence of the accumulation occurred first as a "wrapper," and that with which the series really began gave the impression of the conclusion.

The grouping of similar reminiscences -in a multiplicity of linear stratifications, as represented in a bundle of documents, in a package, etc., I have designated as the formation of a theme. These themes now show a second form of arrangement. I cannot express it differently than by saying that they are