Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/22

8 To be sure both determinants may unite, and as a matter of fact they often do. This is the case when a trauma in itself effective occurs in a state of a powerful paralyzing affect or in a transformed consciousness. But due to the psychic trauma it may also happen that in many persons one of these abnormal states occurs which in turn makes a reaction impossible.

What is common to both groups of determinants is the fact that those psychic traumas which are not rectified by reaction are also prevented from adjustment by associative elaboration. In the first group it is due to the resolution of the patient who wishes to forget the painful experiences and in this way, if possible, to exclude them from association, and in the second group the associative elaboration does not succeed because there is no productive associative relationship between the normal and pathological state of consciousness in which these presentations originated. We shall soon have occasion to discuss more fully these relationships.

Hence we can say, that the reason why the pathogenically formed presentations retain their freshness and affective force is because they are not subject to the normal waste through ab-reaction and reproduction in conditions of uninhibited association.

III. When we discussed the conditions which, according to our experience, are decisive in the development of hysterical phenomena from psychic traumas, we were forced to speak of abnormal states of consciousness in which such pathogenic presentations originate, and we had to emphasize the fact that the recollection of the effective psychic trauma is not to be found in the normal memory of the patient but in the hypnotized memory. The more we occupied ourselves with these phenomena the more certain became our convictions that the splitting of consciousness, so striking in the familiar classical cases of double consciousness, exists rudimentarily in every hysteria, and that the tendency to this dissociation, and with it the tendency towards the appearance of abnormal states of consciousness which we comprehend as "hypnoid states," is the chief phenomenon of this neurosis. In this view we agree with Binet and with both the Janets about