Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/169

 CHAPTER VII. Under the caption of "Defense-Neuropsychoses" I have comprised hysteria, obsessions, as well as certain cases of acute hallucinatory confusion. All these affections evince one common aspect in the fact that their symptoms originated through the psychic mechanism of (unconscious) defense, that is, through the attempt to repress an unbearable idea which appeared in painful contrast to the ego of the patient. I was also able to explain and exemplify by cases reported in the preceding chapters in what sense this psychic process of "defense" or "repression" is to be understood. I have also discussed the laborious but perfectly reliable method of psychoanalysis of which I make use in my examinations, and which at the same time serves as a therapy.

My experiences during the last two years have strengthened my predilection for making the defense the essential point in the psychic mechanism of the mentioned neuroses, and on the other hand have permitted me to give a clinical foundation to the psychological theory. To my surprise I have discovered some simple but sharply circumscribed solutions for the problem of the neuroses which I shall provisionally briefly report in the following pages. It would be inconsistent with this manner of reporting to add to the assertions the required proofs, but I hope to be able to fulfill this obligation in a comprehensive discussion.

That the symptoms of hysteria become comprehensible only through a reduction to "traumatically" effective experiences, and that these psychic traumas refer to the sexual life has already been asserted by Breuer and me in former publications. What I have to add today as a uniform result of thirteen analyzed cases of hysteria concerns, on the one hand, the nature of these sexual traumas, and on the other, the period of life in which they 155