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account, namely, that these
memories, unlike other memories of their past lives, are not at the
patients’ disposal. On the contrary, these experiences are
completely absent from the patient’s memory when they are in
a normal psychical state, or are only present in highly summary
form . Not until they have been questioned under hypnosis do
these memories emerge with the undiminished vividness of a recent
event.
       Thus, for six whole months, one
of our patients reproduced under hypnosis with hallucinatory
vividness everything that had excited her on the same day of the
previous year (during an attack of acute hysteria). A diary kept by
her mother with out her knowledge proved the completeness of the
reproduction. Another patient, partly under hypnosis and partly
during spontaneous attacks, re-lived with hallucinatory clarity all
the events of a hysterical psychosis which she had passed through
ten years earlier and which she had for the most part forgotten
till the moment at which it re-emerged. Moreover, certain memories
of aetiological importance which dated back from fifteen to
twenty-five years were found to be astonishingly intact and to
possess remarkable sensory force, and when they returned they acted
with all the affective strength of new experiences.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    13
     
       This can only be explained on the
view that these memories constitute an exception in their relation
to all the wearing-away processes which we have discussed above. It appears, that is to say, that these memories correspond to
traumas that have not been sufficiently abreacted ; and if we
enter more closely into the reasons which have prevented this, we
find at least two sets of conditions under which the reaction to
the trauma fails to occur.
       In the first group are those
cases in which the patients have not reacted to a psychical trauma
because the nature of the trauma excluded a reaction, as in the
case of the apparently irreparable loss of a loved person or
because social circumstance made a reaction impossible or because
it was a question of things which the patient wished to forget, and
therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and
inhibited and suppressed. It is precisely distressing things of
this kind that, under hypnosis, we find are the basis of hysterical
phenomena (e.g. hysterical deliria in saints and nuns, continent
women and well-brought-up children).
       The second group of conditions
are determined, not by the content of the memories but by the
psychical states in which the patient received the experiences in
question. For we find, under hypnosis, among the causes of
hysterical symptoms ideas which are not in themselves significant,
but whose persistence is due to the fact that they originated
during the prevalence of severely paralysing affects, such as
fright, or during positively abnormal psychical states, such as the
semi-hypnotic twilight state of day-dreaming, auto-hypnoses, and so
on. In such cases it is the nature of the states which makes a
reaction to the event impossible.
       Both kinds of conditions may, of
course, be simultaneously present, and this, in fact, often occurs.
It is so when a trauma which is operative in itself takes place
while a severely paralysing affect prevails or during a modified
state of consciousness. But it also seems to be true that in many
people a psychical trauma produces one of these abnormal
states, which, in turn, makes reaction impossible.
       Both of these groups of
conditions, however, have in common the fact that the psychical
traumas which have not been disposed of by reaction cannot be
disposed of either by being worked over by means of association. In
the first group the patient is determined to forget the distressing
experiences and accordingly excludes them so far as possible from
association; while in the second group the associative working-over
fails to occur because there is no extensive associative connection
between