Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/120

106 stratified around the pathogenic nucleus. It is not difficult to say what determines these strata, and according to what decreasing or increasing magnitude this arrangement follows. They are layers of equal resistance tending towards the nucleus, accompanied by zones of similar alteration of consciousness into which the individual themes extend. The most peripheral layers contain those reminiscences (or fascicles) of the different themes which can readily be recalled and were always perfectly conscious. The deeper one penetrates the more difficult it becomes to recognize the emerging reminiscences until one strikes those near the nucleus which the patient disavows, even at the reproduction.

As we shall hear later it is the peculiarity of the concentric stratification of the pathogenic psychic material which gives to the course of such an analysis its characteristic features. We must now mention the third and most essential arrangement concerning which a general statement can hardly be made. It is the arrangement according to the content of thought, the connection through the logical thread reaching to the nucleus which might in each case correspond to a special, irregular, and manifoldly devious road. This arrangement has a dynamic character in contradistinction to both morphological stratifications mentioned before. Whereas, in a specially formed scheme the latter would be represented by rigid, arched, and straight lines, the course of the logical concatenation would have to be followed with a wand, over the most tortuous route, from the superficial into the deep layers and back, generally, however, progressing from the peripheral to the central nucleus, and touching thereby all stations; that is, its movement is similar to the zigzag movement of the knight in the solution of a chess problem.

I will still adhere for a moment to the last comparison in order to call attention to a point in which it does not do justice to the qualities of the thing compared. The logical connection corresponds not only to a zigzag-like devious line, but rather to a ramifying and especially to a converging system of lines. It has a junction in which two or more threads meet only to proceed thence united, and, as a rule, many threads running independently, or here and there connected by by-paths, open into the nucleus. To put it in different words, it is very remarkable how frequently a symptom is manifoldly determined, that is, over-determined.