paranoiacs are of the same nature, they are fancies which directly become conscious, and which are borne by the masochistic-sadistic components of the sexual impulse. Complete counterparts of these can also be found in certain unconscious fancies of hysterics. It is a familiar, practically significant fact that hysterics express their fancies not as symptoms but in conscious realization, and in this way they feign and commit murders, assaults, and sexual aggressions.
All that can be found out about the sexuality of the psychoneurotic can be ascertained by the psychoanalytic examination which leads from the obtrusive symptoms to the hidden unconscious fancies; herein, too, is the fact, the communication of which will be put in the foreground of this short preliminary publication.
Probably in view of the difficulties which prevent the effort of the unconscious fancies from expressing themselves, the relation between the fancies to the symptoms is not simple but rather manifoldly complicated.[1] As a rule, that is, in a fully developed and a long standing neurosis, a symptom does not correspond to an individual unconscious fancy, but to a number of such, and indeed it is not arbitrary but in lawful combination. To be sure in the beginning of the disease all these complications are not developed.
For the sake of general interest I pass over the connection of this communication and insert a series of formulae which strive to progressively exhaust the nature of hysteria. They do not contradict one another but correspond partly to more complete and sharper conceptions, and partly to the use of different points of view.
1. The hysterical symptom is the memory symbol of certain efficacious (traumatic) impressions and experiences.
2. The hysterical symptom is the compensation by conversion for the associative return of the traumatic experience.
3. The hysterical symptom—like all other psychic formations—is the expression of a wish realization.
4. The hysterical symptom is the realization of an unconscious fancy serving as a wish fulfillment.
- ↑ The same thing holds true for the relation between the "latent" thoughts of the dream and the elements of the manifest content of the dream. See the Chapter on the "Dream Work" in the author's Interpretation of Dreams.
