Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/138

124 obsessions, but from now on their ways part. The unbearable idea in hysteria is rendered harmless because the sum of excitement is transformed into physical manifestations, a process for which I would like to propose the term conversion.

The conversion may be total or partial, and follows that motor or sensory innervation which is either ultimately or more loosely connected with the traumatic experience. In this way the ego succeeds in freeing itself from opposition but instead it becomes burdened with a memory symbol which remains in consciousness as an unadjusted motor innervation, or as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation similar to a parasite. It thus remains fixed until a conversion takes place in the opposite direction. The memory symbol of the repressed idea does not perish, but from now on forms the nucleus for a second psychic group.

I will follow up this view of the psycho-physical processes in hysteria with a few more words. If such a nucleus for an hysterical splitting is once formed in a "traumatic moment" it then increases in other moments which might be designated as "auxiliary traumatic" as soon as a newly formed similar impression succeeds in breaking through the barrier formed by the will and in adding new affects to the weakened idea, and in forcing for a while the associative union of both psychic groups until a new conversion produces defense. The condition thus attained in hysteria in regard to the distribution of the excitement, proves to be unstable in most cases. As shown by the familiar contrast of the attacks and the persistent symptoms, the excitement which was pushed on a false path (in the bodily innervation) now and then returns to the idea from which it was discharged and forces the person to associative elaboration or to adjustment in hysterical attacks. The effect of Breuer's cathartic method consists in the fact that it consciously reconducts the excitement from the physical into the psychic spheres and then forces an adjustment of the contradiction through intellectual work, and a discharge of the excitement through speech.

If the splitting of consciousness in acquired hysteria is due to an act of volition we can explain with surprising simplicity the remarkable fact that hypnosis regularly broadens the narrowed consciousness of hysteria, and causes the split off psychic groups to become accessible. For we know that it is peculiar to all