Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/17

Rh In other cases the connection is not so simple, there being only as it were a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, just as in the normal dream. Thus psychic pain may result in neuralgia, or the affect of moral disgust may cause vomiting. We have studied patients who were wont to make the most prolific use of such symbolization. In still other cases such a determination is at first sight incomprehensible, yet to this group belong the typical hysterical symptoms such as hemianesthesia, contraction of visual field, epileptiform convulsions and many others. The explanation of our views on this group we have to reserve for the more detailed discussion of the subject.

Such observations seem to demonstrate the pathogenic analogy between simple hysteria and traumatic neurosis and justify a broader conception of "traumatic hysteria." The active etiological factor in traumatic neurosis is really not the insignificant bodily injury but the affect of the fright, that is, the psychic trauma. In an analogous manner our investigations show that the causes of many, if not of all, cases of hysteria can be designated as psychic traumas. Every experience which produces the painful affect of fear, anxiety, shame or of psychic pain may act as a psychic trauma. Whether an experience becomes of traumatic importance naturally depends on the person affected as well on the determination to be mentioned later. In ordinary hysteria instead of one big trauma we not seldom find many partial traumas, grouped causes which can be of traumatic significance only when summarized and which belong together in so far as they form small fragments of the sorrowful tale. In still other cases apparently indifferent circumstances gain traumatic dignity through their connection with the real effective event or with a period of time of special excitability which they then retain but which otherwise would have no significance.

Nevertheless the causal connection between the provoking psychic trauma and the hysterical phenomena does not perhaps resemble the trauma which as the agent provocateur would call forth the symptom which would become independent and continue to exist. We have to claim still more, namely, that the psychic trauma or the memory of the same acts like a foreign body which even long after its penetration must continue to