Studies in Hysteria

Every experience which produces the painful affect of fear, anxiety, shame, or of psychic pain may act as a trauma.

For it was really shown that these memories correspond to traumas which were not sufficiently 'ab-reacted,' and on closer investigation of the reasons for this hindrance, we can find at least two series of determinants through which the reaction to the trauma was omitted.

Hence, we can say, that the reason why the pathogenically formed ideas retain their freshness and affective force is because they are not subject to the normal fading through abreaction and through reproduction in states of uninhibited association.

A normal person is in this way capable of dissipating the accompanying affect by means of association.

But man finds a substitute for this action in speech through which help the affect can well-nigh be ab-reacted

If the success of this reaction is of sufficient strength, it results in the disappearance of a great part of the affect.

In ordinary hysterias we frequently find, instead of one large trauma, many partial traumas, grouped causes which can be of traumatic significance only when summarized, and which belong together insofar as they form small fragments of the sorrowful tale.

but by the psychic states with which the corresponding experiences in the patient have united.

It abrogates the efficacy of the original non-abreacted ideas by affording an outlet to their strangulated affects through speech. It brings them to associative correction by drawing them into normal consciousness (in mild hypnosis) or by eliminating them through medical suggestion in the same way as in somnambulism with amnesia.