toms, habits and phobias which are only explainable by returning to those youthful experiences, and the logical structure of the neurotic manifestation makes it impossible to reject the faithfully retained memories of childhood. Except through psychoanalysis it is of no avail to ask a hysterical patient about these infantile traumas; their remains can only be found in the morbid symptoms and not in conscious memory.
All the experiences and excitements which prepare the way for, or occasion the outburst of, hysteria in the period of life after puberty evidently act through the fact that they awaken the memory remnants of those infantile traumas which do not become conscious but lead to the liberation of affect and repression. It is quite in harmony with this role of the later traumas not to be subject to the strict limitation of the infantile traumas, but that both in intensity and quality they can vary from an actual sexual assault to a mere approximation of the sexual, such as perceiving the sexual acts of others, or receiving information concerning sexual processes.[1]
In my first communication on the defense neuropsychoses I failed to explain how the exertion of a hitherto healthy individual to forget such traumatic happenings would result in the real intentional repression, and thus open the door for the defense neurosis. It can not depend on the nature of the experience, as other persons remain unaffected despite the same motives. Hysteria cannot therefore be fully explained by the effect of the trauma, and we are forced to admit that the capacity for hysteria already existed before the trauma.
This indefinite hysterical predisposition can now wholly or partially be substituted by the posthumous effect of the infantile sexual trauma. The "repression" of the memory of a painful sexual experience of maturer years can take place only in per-
- ↑ In an article on the anxiety neurosis (Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1895, Nr. 2) I stated that "an anxiety neurosis which can almost typically be combined with hysteria can be evoked in maturing girls at the first encounter with the sexual problem." I know today that the occasion in which such virginal anxiety breaks out does not really correspond to the first encounter with sexuality, but that in such persons there was in childhood a precedent experience of sexual passivity which memory was awakened at the "first encounter."
