Freud - Complete Works Read Free Page B

the normal state of consciousness and the pathological ones
in which the ideas made their appearance. We shall have occasion
immediately to enter further into this matter.
       It may therefore be said that
the ideas which have become pathological have persisted with such
freshness and affective strength because they have been denied the
normal wearing-away process by means of abreaction and reproduction
in states of uninhibited association .
     
----
    Studies On Hysteria
    14
     
    III
     
       We have stated the conditions
which, as our experience shows, are responsible for the development
of hysterical phenomena from psychical traumas. In so doing, we
have already been obliged to speak of abnormal states of
consciousness in which these pathogenic ideas arise, and to
emphasize the fact that the recollection of the operative psychical
trauma is not to be found in the patient’s normal memory but
in his memory when he is hypnotized. The longer we have been
occupied with these phenomena the more we have become convinced
that the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the
well-known classical cases under the form of ‘double
conscience’ is present to a rudimentary degree in every
hysteria, and that a tendency to such dissociation, and with it the
emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring
together under the term ‘hypnoid’) is the basic
phenomenon of this neurosis . In these views we concur with
Binet and the two Janets, though we have had no experience of the
remarkable findings they have made on anaesthetic patients.
       We should like to balance the
familiar thesis that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria by another
- the basis and sine qua non of hysteria is the existence of
hypnoid states. These states share with one another and with
hypnosis, however much they may differ in other respects, one
common feature: the ideas which emerge in them are very intense but
are cut off from associative communication with the rest of the
content of consciousness. Associations may take place between these
hypnoid states, and their ideational content can in this way reach
a more or less high degree of psychical organization. Moreover, the
nature of these states and the extent to which they are cut off
from the remaining conscious processes must be supposed to vary
just as happens in hypnosis, which ranges from a light drowsiness
to somnambulism, from complete recollection to total amnesia.
       If hypnoid states of this kind
are already present before the onset of the manifest illness, they
provide the soil in which the affect plants the pathogenic memory
with its consequent somatic phenomena. This corresponds to dispositional hysteria. We have found, however, that a
severe trauma (such as occurs in a traumatic neurosis) or a
laborious suppression (as of a sexual affect, for instance) can
bring about a splitting-off of groups of ideas even in people who
are in other respects unaffected; and this would be the mechanism
of psychically acquired hysteria. Between the extremes of
these two forms we must assume the existence of a series of cases
within which the liability to dissociation in the subject and the
affective magnitude of the trauma vary inversely.
     
----
    Studies On Hysteria
    15
     
       We have nothing new to say on the
question of the origin of these dispositional hypnoid states. They
often, it would seem, grow out of the day-dreams which are so
common even in healthy people and to which needlework and similar
occupations render women especially prone. Why it is that the
‘pathological associations’ brought about in these
states are so stable and why they have so much more influence on
somatic processes than ideas are usually found to do - these
questions coincide with the general problem of the effectiveness of
hypnotic suggestions. Our observations contribute nothing fresh on
this subject. But they throw a light on the contradiction between
the dictum ‘hysteria is a