result, as the discovery of a caput Nili of neuropathology.”  Ten years later, enlarging rather than restricting his conception, Freud remarks:  “Sexuality is not a mere deus ex machina which intervenes but once in the hysterical process; it is the motive force of every separate symptom and every expression of a symptom.  The morbid phenomena constitute, to speak plainly, the patient’s sexual activity."[279] The actual hysterical fit, Freud now states, may be regarded as “the substitute for a once practiced and then abandoned auto-erotic satisfaction,” and similarly it may be regarded as an equivalent of coitus.[280]

It is natural to ask how this conception affects that elaborate picture of hysteria laboriously achieved by Charcot and his school.  It cannot be said that it abolishes any of the positive results reached by Charcot, but it certainly alters their significance and value; it presents them in a new light and changes the whole perspective.  With his passion for getting at tangible definite physical facts, Charcot was on very safe ground.  But he was content to neglect the psychic analysis of hysteria, while yet proclaiming that hysteria is a purely psychic disorder.  He had no cause of hysteria to present save only heredity.  Freud certainly admits heredity, but, as he points out, the part it plays has been overrated.  It is too vague and general to carry us far, and when a specific and definite cause can be found, the part played by heredity recedes to become merely a condition, the soil on which the “specific etiology” works.  Here probably Freud’s enthusiasm at first carried him too far and the most important modification he has made in his views occurs at this point:  he now attaches a preponderant influence to heredity.  He has realized that sexual activity in one form or another is far too common in childhood to make it possible to lay very great emphasis on “traumatic lesions” of this character, and he has also realized that an outcrop of fantasies may somewhat later develop on these childish activities, intervening between them and the subsequent morbid symptoms.  He is thus led to emphasize anew the significance of heredity, not, however, in Charcot’s sense, as general neuropathic disposition but as “sexual constitution.”  The significance of “infantile sexual lesions” has also tended to give place to that of “infantilism of sexuality."[281]

The real merit of Freud’s subtle investigations is that—­while possibly furnishing a justification of the imperfectly-understood idea that had floated in the mind of observers ever since the name “hysteria” was first invented—­he has certainly supplied a definite psychic explanation of a psychic malady.  He has succeeded in presenting clearly, at the expense of much labor, insight, and sympathy, a dynamic view of the psychic processes involved in the constitution of the hysterical state, and such a view seems to show that the physical symptoms laboriously brought