to light by Charcot are largely but epiphenomena and by-products of an emotional process, often of tragic significance to the subject, which is taking place in the most sensitive recess of the psychic organism.  That the picture of the mechanism involved, presented to us by Professor Freud, cannot be regarded as a final and complete account of the matter, may readily be admitted.  It has developed in Freud’s own hands, and some of the developments will require very considerable confirmation before they can be accepted as generally true.[282] But these investigations have at least served to open the door, which Charcot had inconsistently held closed, into the deeper mysteries of hysteria, and have shown that here, if anywhere, further research will be profitable.  They have also served to show that hysteria may be definitely regarded as, in very many cases at least, a manifestation of the sexual emotions and their lesions; in other words, a transformation of auto-erotism.

The conception of hysteria so vigorously enforced by Charcot and his school is thus now beginning to appear incomplete.  But we have to recognize that that incompleteness was right and necessary.  A strong reaction was needed against a widespread view of hysteria that was in large measure scientifically false.  It was necessary to show clearly that hysteria is a definite disorder, even when the sexual organs and emotions are swept wholly out of consideration; and it was also necessary to show that the lying and dissimulation so widely attributed to the hysterical were merely the result of an ignorant and unscientific misinterpretation of psychic elements of the disease.  This was finally and triumphantly achieved by Charcot’s school.

There is only one other point in the explanation of hysteria which I will here refer to, and that because it is usually ignored, and because it has relationship to the general psychology of the sexual emotions.  I refer to that physiological hysteria which is the normal counterpart of the pathological hysteria which has been described in its physical details by Charcot, and to which alone the term should strictly be applied.  Even though hysteria as a disease may be described as one and indivisible, there are yet to be found, among the ordinary and fairly healthy population, vague and diffused hysteroid symptoms which are dissipated in a healthy environment, or pass nearly unnoted, only to develop in a small proportion of cases, under the influence of a more pronounced heredity, or a severe physical or psychic lesion, into that definite morbid state which is properly called hysteria.