Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/201

Rh It was found that the form of the malady, be it neurasthenia or anxiety neurosis, shows a constant relation to the form of the sexual injury. In the typical cases of neurasthenia we could always demonstrate masturbation or accumulated pollutions, while in anxiety neurosis we could find such factors as coitus interruptus, "frustrated excitement," etc. The moment of insufficient discharge of the generated libido seemed to be common to both. Only after this experience, which is easy to gain and very often confirmed, had I the courage to claim for the sexual influences a prominent place in the etiology of the neurosis. It also happened that the mixed forms of neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis occurring so often, showed the admixture of the etiologies accepted for both, and that such a bipartition in the form of the manifestations of the neurosis seemed to accord well with the polar characters of sexuality (male and female).

At the same time, while I assigned to sexuality this significance in the origin of the simple neurosis, I still professed for the psycho-neuroses (hysteria and obsessions) a purely psychological theory in which the sexual moment was no differently considered than any other emotional sources. Together with J. Breuer, and in addition to observations which he has made on his hysterical patients fully a decade before I have studied the mechanism of the origin of hysterical symptoms by the awakening of memories in hypnotic states. We obtained information which permitted us to cross the bridge from Charcot's traumatic hysteria to the common non-traumatic hysteria. We reached the conception that the hysterical symptoms are permanent results of psychic traumas, and that the amount of affect belonging to them was pushed away from conscious elaboration by special determinations, thus forcing an abnormal road into bodily innervation. The terms "strangulated afifect," "conversion," and " ab-reaction," comprise the distinctive characteristics of this conception.

In the close relations of the psychoneuroses to the simple neuroses, which can go so far that the diagnostic distinction is not always easy for the unpracticed, it could happen that the cognition gained from one sphere has also taken effect in the other. Leaving such influences out of the question, the deep study of the psychic traumas also leads to the same results. If by the "analytic" method we continue to trace the psychic