To understand the position of Breuer and Freud we may start from the phenomenon of “nervous shock” produced by physical traumatism, often of a very slight character.  Charcot had shown that such “nervous shock,” with the chain of resulting symptoms, is nothing more or less than hysteria.  Breuer and Freud may be linked on to Charcot at this point.  They began by regarding the most typical hysteria as really a psychic traumatism; that is to say, that it starts in a lesion, or rather in repeated lesions, of the emotional organism.  It is true that the school of Charcot admitted the influence of moral shock, especially of the emotion of fear, but that merely as an “agent provocateur,” and with a curious perversity Gilles de la Tourette, certainly reflecting the attitude of Charcot, in his elaborate treatise on hysteria fails to refer to the sphere of the sexual emotions even when enumerating the “agents provocateurs."[274]

The influence of fear is not denied by Breuer and Freud, but they have found that careful psychic analysis frequently shows that the shock of a commonplace “fear” is really rooted in a lesion of the sexual emotions.  A typical and very simple illustration is furnished in a case, recorded by Breuer, in which a young girl of seventeen had her first hysterical attack after a cat sprang on her shoulders as she was going downstairs.  Careful investigation showed that this girl had been the object of somewhat ardent attentions from a young man whose advances she had resisted, although her own sexual emotions had been aroused.  A few days before, she had been surprised by this young man on these same dark stairs, and had forcibly escaped from his hands.  Here was the real psychic traumatism, the operation of which merely became manifest in the cat.  “But in how many cases,” asks Breuer, “is a cat thus reckoned as a completely sufficient causa efficiens?”

In every case that they have investigated Breuer and Freud have found some similar secret lesion of the psychic sexual sphere.  In one case a governess, whose training has been severely upright, is, in spite of herself and without any encouragement, led to experience for the father of the children under her care an affection which she refuses to acknowledge even to herself; in another, a young woman finds herself falling in love with her brother-in-law; again, an innocent girl suddenly discovers her uncle in the act of sexual intercourse with her playmate, and a boy on his way home from school is subjected to the coarse advances of a sexual invert.  In nearly every case, as Freud eventually found reason to believe, a primary lesion of the sexual emotions dates from the period of puberty and frequently of childhood, and in nearly every case the intimately private nature of the lesion causes it to be carefully hidden from everyone, and even to be unacknowledged by the subject of it.  In the earlier cases Breuer and Freud found that a slight degree of hypnosis is necessary to bring the