It is part of the mechanism of this process, as understood by these authors, that the physical symptoms of hysteria are constituted, by a process of conversion, out of the injured emotions, which then sink into the background or altogether out of consciousness.  Thus, they found the prolonged tension of nursing a near and dear relative to be a very frequent factor in the production of hysteria.  For instance, an originally rheumatic pain experienced by a daughter when nursing her father becomes the symbol in memory of her painful psychic excitement, and this perhaps for several reasons, but chiefly because its presence in consciousness almost exactly coincided with that excitement.  In another way, again, nausea and vomiting may become a symbol through the profound sense of disgust with which some emotional shock was associated.  Then the symbol begins to have a life of its own, and draws hidden strength from the emotion with which it is correlated.  Breuer and Freud have found by careful investigation that the pains and physical troubles of hysteria are far from being capricious, but may be traced in a varying manner to an origin in some incident, some pain, some action, which was associated with a moment of acute psychic agony.  The process of conversion was an involuntary escape from an intolerable emotion, comparable to the physical pain sometimes sought in intense mental grief, and the patient wins some relief from the tortured emotions, though at the cost of psychic abnormality, of a more or less divided state of consciousness and of physical pain, or else anaesthesia.  In Charcot’s third stage of the hysterical convulsion, that of “attitudes passionnelles,” Breuer and Freud see the hallucinatory reproduction of a recollection which is full of significance for the origin of the hysterical manifestations.

The final result reached by these workers is clearly stated by each writer.  “The main observation of our predecessors,” states Breuer,[277] “still preserved in the word ‘hysteria,’ is nearer to the truth than the more recent view which puts sexuality almost in the last line, with the object of protecting the patient from moral reproaches.  Certainly the sexual needs of the hysterical are just as individual and as various in force as those of the healthy.  But they suffer from them, and in large measure, indeed, they suffer precisely through the struggle with them, through the effort to thrust sexuality aside.”  “The weightiest fact,” concludes Freud,[278] “on which we strike in a thorough pursuit of the analysis is this:  From whatever side and from whatever symptoms we start, we always unfailingly reach the region of the sexual life.  Here, first of all, an etiological condition of hysterical states is revealed....  At the bottom of every case of hysteria—­and reproducible by an analytical effort after even an interval of long years—­may be found one or more facts of precocious sexual experience belonging to earliest youth.  I regard this as an important