Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/203

Rh view, and that I now think myself in a position to correct by detailed experience the imperfections, the displacements, and the misconceptions, from which this theory then suffered. By chance my former rather meagre material furnished me with a great number of cases in which infantile histories, sexual seduction by grown-up persons or older children, played the main role. I over-estimated the frequency of these (otherwise not to be doubted) occurrences, the more so because I was then in no position to distinguish definitely the deceptive memories of hysterical patients concerning their childhood, from the traces of the real processes, whereas, I have since then learned to explain many a seduction fancy as an attempt at defense against the reminiscences of their own sexual activity (infantile masturbation). The emphasis laid on the "traumatic" element of the infantile sexual experience disappeared with this explanation, and it remained obvious that the infantile sexual activities (be they spontaneous or provoked) dictate the course of the later sexual life after maturity. The same explanation which really corrects the most significant of my original errors perforce also changed the conception of the mechanism of the hysterical symptoms. These no longer appeared as direct descendants of repressed memories of sexual infantile experiences, but between the symptoms and the infantile impressions there slipped in the fancies (confabulations of memory) of the patients which were mostly produced during the years of puberty and which on the one hand, are raised from and over the infantile memories, and on the other, are immediately transformed into symptoms. Only after the introduction of the element of hysterical fancies did the structure of the neurosis and its relation to the life of the patient become transparent. It also resulted in a veritable surprising analogy between these unconscious hysterical fancies and the romances which became conscious as delusions in paranoia.

After this correction the "infantile sexual traumas" were in a sense supplanted by the "infantilism of sexuality." A second modification of the original theory was not remote. With the accepted frequency of seduction in childhood there also disappeared the enormous emphasis of the accidental influences of sexuality to which I wished to shift the main role in the causation of the disease without, however, denying constitutional and