Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/19

Rh of a chain of causal connecting links but directly as a provoking cause, just perhaps as in the awakened consciousness where the memory of a psychic pain may later call forth tears. The hysteric suffers mostly from reminiscences.

II.

It would seem at first rather surprising that long-forgotten experiences should effect so intensively, and that their recollections should not be subject to the decay into which all our memories merge. We will perhaps gain some understanding of these facts by the following examinations.

The blurring or loss of an affect of memory depends on a great many factors. In the first place it is of great consequence whether there was an energetic reaction to the affectful experience or not. By reaction we here understand a whole series of voluntary or involuntary reflexes, from crying to an act of revenge, through which according to experience affects are discharged. If the success of this reaction is of sufficient strength it results in the disappearance of a great part of the affect. Language attests this fact of daily observation, in such expressions as "to give vent to one's feeling," to be "relieved by weeping," etc.

If the reaction is suppressed the affect remains united with the memory. An insult retaliated, be it only in words, is differently recalled than one that had to be taken in silence. Language also recognizes this distinction between the psychic and physical results and designates most characteristically the silently endured suffering as "grievance." The reaction of the person injured to the trauma has really no perfect "cathartic" effect unless it is an adequate reaction like revenge. But man finds a substitute for this action in speech through which help the affect can well nigh be ab-reacted ("abreagirt"). In other cases talking