Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/212

198 5. The hysterical symptom serves as a sexual gratification, and represents a part of the sexual life of the individual (corresponding to one of the components of his sexual impulse).

6. The hysterical symptom, in a fashion, corresponds to the return of the sexual gratification which was real in infantile life but had been repressed since then.

7. The hysterical symptom results as a compromise between two opposing affects or impulse incitements, one of which strives to bring to realization a partial impulse, or a component of the sexual constitution, while the other strives to suppress the same.

8. The hysterical symptom may undertake the representation of diverse unconscious non sexual incitements, but can not lack the sexual significance.

It is the seventh among these determinations which expresses most exhaustively the essence of the hysterical symptom as a realization of an unconscious fancy, and it is the eighth which properly designates the significance of the sexual moment. Some of the preceding formulae are contained as first steps in this formula.

In view of these relations between symptoms and fancies one can readily reach from the psychoanalysis of the symptoms to the knowledge of the components of the sexual impulse controlling the individual, just as I have shown in the "Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory." But in some cases this examination gives rather unexpected results. It shows that many symptoms can not be solved by one unconscious sexual fancy or by a series of fancies in which the most significant and most primitive is of a sexual nature, but in order to solve the symptom two sexual fancies are required, one of the masculine and one of the feminine character, so that one of these fancies arises from a homosexual impulse. The axiom pronounced in formula seven is in no way effected by this novelty, so that a hysterical symptom necessarily corresponds to a compromise between a libidinous and a repressed emotion, but besides that, it can correspond to a union of two libidinous fancies of contrary sex characters.

I refrain from giving examples for this axiom. Experience has taught me that short analyses compressed into the form of an abstract can never make the demonstrable impression for which they were intended. The communication of fully analyzed cases must be reserved for another place.