The way was thus opened for further investigations on the psychic side.  Charcot had affirmed the power, not only of physical traumatism, but even of psychic lesions—­of moral shocks—­to provoke its manifestations, but his sole contribution to the psychology of this psychic malady,—­and this was borrowed from the Nancy school,—­lay in the one word “suggestibility”; the nature and mechanism of this psychic process he left wholly unexplained.  This step has been taken by others, in part by Janet, who, from 1889 onward, has not only insisted that the emotions stand in the first line among the causes of hysteria, but has also pointed out some portion of the mechanism of this process; thus, he saw the significance of the fact, already recognized, that strong emotions tend to produce anaesthesia and to lead to a condition of mental disaggregation, favorable to abulia, or abolition of will-power.  It remained to show in detail the mechanism by which the most potent of all the emotions effects its influence, and, by attempting to do this, the Viennese investigators, Breuer and especially Freud, have greatly aided the study of hysteria.[272] They have not, it is important to remark, overturned the positive elements in their great forerunner’s work.  Freud began as a disciple of Charcot, and he himself remarks that, in his earlier investigations of hysteria, he had no thought of finding any sexual etiology for that malady; he would have regarded any such suggestion as an insult to his patient.  The results reached by these workers were the outcome of long and detailed investigation.  Freud has investigated many cases of hysteria in minute detail, often devoting to a single case over a hundred hours of work.  The patients, unlike those on whom the results of the French school have been mainly founded, all belonged to the educated classes, and it was thus possible to carry out an elaborate psychic investigation which would be impossible among the uneducated.  Breuer and Freud insist on the fine qualities of mind and character frequently found among the hysterical.  They cannot accept suggestibility as an invariable characteristic of hysteria, only abnormal excitability; they are far from agreeing with Janet (although on many points at one with him), that psychic weakness marks hysteria; there is merely an appearance of mental weakness, they say, because the mental activity of the hysterical is split up, and only a part of it is conscious.[273] The superiority of character of the hysterical is indicated by the fact that the conflict between their ideas of right and the bent of their inclinations is often an element in the constitution of the hysterical state.  Breuer and Freud are prepared to assert that the hysterical are among “the flower of humanity,” and they refer to those qualities of combined imaginative genius and practical energy which characterized St. Theresa, “the patron saint of the hysterical.”