Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/24

10 intellects, the strongest wills, greatest principles, and of the subtlest minds. In these cases such characteristics are only true for the waking thought of the person, for in his hypnotic state he is alienated just as we are in the dream. Yet, whereas our dream' psychoses do not influence our waking state, the products of hypnotic states project as hysterical phenomena into the waking state.

IV.

Almost the same assertions that we have advanced in reference to the continuous hysterical symptoms we may also repeat concerning hysterical crises. As is known we have Charcot's schematic description of the "major" hysterical attack which when complete shows four phases: (1) The epileptoid, (2) the grand movements, (3) the emotional—attitudes passionnelles (hallucinatory phase), and (4) the delirious. By shortening or prolonging the attack and by isolating the individual phases Charcot caused a succession of all those forms of the hysterical attack which are really observed more frequently than the complete grande attaque.

Our attempted explanation refers to the third phase, that is the attitudes passionnelles. Wherever it is prominent it contains the hallucinatory reproduction of a memory which was significant for the hysterical onset. It is the memory of a grand trauma, the so called of traumatic hysteria or of a series of connected partial traumas found at the basis of the common hysteria. Finally the attack may bring back that occurrence which on account of its meeting with a moment of special predisposition was raised to a trauma.

There are also attacks which ostensibly consist only of motor phenomena and lack the passionnelle phase. It is possible during such an attack of general twitching, cataleptic rigidity or an attaque de sommeil, to put one's self en rapport with the patient, or still better, if one succeeds in evoking the attack in a hypnotic state, it will then be found that here, too, the root of it is the memory of a psychic trauma, or of a series of traumas which make themselves otherwise prominent in an hallucinatory phase. A little girl had suffered for years from attacks of general convulsions which could be and were taken for epileptic. She was