Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/171

Rh them were indeed abominable. Among the persons who were guilty of such serious abuse we have in the first place nurses, governesses, and other servants to whom children are left much too carelessly, then in regrettable frequency come the teachers; but in seven of the thirteen cases we dealt with innocent childish offenders, mostly brothers who for years entertained sexual relations with their younger sisters. The course of events always resembled some of the cases which could with certainty be tracked, namely, that the boy had been abused by a person of the feminine sex, thus awakening in him prematurely the libido, and that after a few years he repeated in sexual aggression on his sister the same procedures to which he himself was subjected.

I must exclude active masturbation from the list of sexual injuries of early childhood as being pathogenic for hysteria. That it is so very frequently found associated with hysteria is due to the fact that masturbation in itself is more frequently the result of abuse or seduction than one supposes. It not seldom happens that both members of a childish pair later in life become afflicted by defense neuroses, the brother by obsessions and the sister by hysteria, which naturally gives the appearance of a familial neurotic predisposition. This pseudo-heredity is now and then solved in a surprising manner. I have had under observation a brother, sister, and a somewhat older cousin. The analysis which I have undertaken with the brother showed me that he suffered from reproaches for being the cause of his sister's malady; he himself was corrupted by his cousin, concerning whom it was known in the family that he fell a victim to his nurse.

I can not definitely state up to what age sexual damage occurs in the etiology of hysteria, but I doubt whether sexual passivity can cause repression after the eighth and tenth year unless qualified for it by previous experiences. The lower limit reaches as far as memory in general, that is, to the delicate age of one and one half or two years! (two cases). In a number of my cases the sexual trauma (or the number of traumas) occurred during the third and fourth year of life. I myself would not lend credence to this peculiar discovery if it were not for the fact that the later development of the neurosis furnished it with full trustworthiness. In every case there are a number of morbid