followed, the natural purpose of the hysterical paroxysm accomplished, there would remain as a result of the treatment—­instead of one discontented woman—­two happy people, and the possible beginning of a third.”

“Natural, primary sexual hysteria in woman,” King concludes, “is a temporary modification of the nervous government of the body and the distribution of nerve-force (occurring for the most part, as we see it to-day, in prudish women of strong moral principle, whose volition has disposed them to resist every sort of liberty or approach from the other sex), consisting in a transient abdication of the general, volitional, and self-preservational ego, while the reins of government are temporarily assigned to the usurping power of the reproductive ego, so that the reproductive government overrules the government by volition, and thus, as it were, forcibly compels the woman’s organism to so dispose itself, at a suitable time and place, as to allow, invite, and secure the approach of the other sex, whether she will or not, to the end that Nature’s imperious demand for reproduction shall be obeyed.”

This perhaps rather fantastic description is not a presentation of hysteria in the technical sense, but we may admit that it presents a state which, if not the real physiological counterpart of the hysterical convulsion, is yet distinctly analogous to the latter.  The sexual orgasm has this correspondence with the hysterical fit, that they both serve to discharge the nervous centres and relieve emotional tension.  It may even happen, especially in the less severe forms of hysteria, that the sexual orgasm takes place during the hysterical fit; this was found by Rosenthal, of Vienna, to be always the case in the semiconscious paroxysms of a young girl whose condition was easily cured;[286] no doubt such cases would be more frequently found if they were sought for.  In severe forms of hysteria, however, it frequently happens, as so many observers have noted, that normal sexual excitement has ceased to give satisfaction, has become painful, perverted, paradoxical.  Freud has enabled us to see how a shock to the sexual emotions, injuring the emotional life at its source, can scarcely fail sometimes to produce such a result.  But the necessity for nervous explosion still persists.[287] It may, indeed, persist, even in an abnormally strong degree, in consequence of the inhibition of normal activities generally.  The convulsive fit is the only form of relief open to the tension.  “A lady whom I long attended,” remarks Ashwell, “always rejoiced when the fit was over, since it relieved her system generally, and especially her brain, from painful irritation which had existed for several previous days.”  That the fit mostly fails to give real satisfaction, and that it fails to cure the disease, is due to the fact that it is a morbid form of relief.  The same character of hysteria is seen, with more satisfactory results for the most part, in the influence of external