hysteria. The first to reveal itself to us was really the hypnoid-hysteria, for which I can mention no better example than Breuer's case of Miss Anna O.[1] For this form of hysteria Breuer gives an essentially different psychic mechanism than for the form which is characterized by conversion. Here the idea becomes pathogenic through the fact that it is conceived in a peculiar psychic state, having remained from the very beginning external to the ego. It therefore needs no psychic force to keep it away from the ego, and it need not awaken any resistance when, with the help of the somnambulic psychic authority, it is initiated into the ego. The history of Anna O. really shows no such resistance.
I held this distinction as so essential that it has readily induced me to adhere to the formation of the hypnoid-hysteria. It is however remarkable that in my own experience I encountered no genuine hypnoid-hysteria, whatever I treated changed itself into a defense hysteria. Not that I have never dealt with symptoms which manifestly originated in separated conscious states, and therefore were excluded from being accepted into the ego. I found this also in my own cases, but I could show that the so called hypnoid state owed its separation to the fact that a split-off psychic group originated before, through defense. In brief, I cannot suppress the suspicion that hypnoid and defense hysteria meet somewhere at their roots, and that the defense is the primary thing; but I know nothing about it.
Equally uncertain is at present my opinion concerning the retention hysteria in which the therapeutic work is also supposed to follow without any resistance. I had a case which I took for a typical retention hysteria, and I was pleased over the anticipation of an easy and certain success; but this success did not come as easy as the work really was. I therefore presume, and again with all caution appropriate to ignorance, that in retention hysteria, too, we can find at its basis a fragment of defense which has thrust the whole process into hysteria. Let us hope that new experiences will soon decide whether I am running into the danger of one-sidedness and error in my tendency to spread the conception of defense for the whole of hysteria.
Thus far I have dealt with the difficulties and technique of the
- ↑ 1. c, p. 15.
