Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/173

Rh sons in whom this experience can bring into activity the memory remnants of an infantile trauma.

The prerequisite of obsessions is also a sexual infantile experience, but of a different nature than that of hysteria. The etiology of both defense neuropsychoses now shows the following relation to the etiology of both simple neuroses, neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis. As I have shown above, both the latter neuroses are the direct results of the sexual noxas alone, while both defense neuroses are the direct results of sexual noxas which acted before the appearance of sexual maturity that is, they are the results of the psychic memory remnants of these noxas. The actual causes producing neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis simultaneously play the rôle of inciting causes of the defense neuroses, and on the other hand, the specific causes of the defense neuroses, the infantile traumas, may simultaneously prepare the soil for the later developing neurasthenia. Finally it not seldom happens that the existence of a neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis is only preserved by continued recollection of an infantile trauma rather than by actual sexual injuries.