[265] Gilles de la Tourette, Archives de Tocologie et de Gynecologie, June, 1895.

[266] Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria, 1897, p. 290; summarized in the Journal of Mental Science, January, 1898.

[267] From the earliest times it was held that menstruation favors hysteria; more recently, Landouzy recorded a number of observations showing that hysterical attacks coincide with perfectly healthy menstruation; while Ball has maintained that it is only during menstruation that hysteria appears in its true color.  See the opinions collected by Icard, La Femme pendant la Periode Menstruelle, pp. 75-81.

[268] Krafft-Ebing, “Ueber Neurosen und Psychosen durch Sexuelle Abstinenz,” Jahrbuecher fuer Psychiatrie, vol. iii, 1888.  It must, however, be added that the relief of hysteria by sexual satisfaction is not rare, and that Rosenthal finds that the convulsions are thus diminished. (Allgemeine Wiener Medizinal-Zeitung, Nos. 46 and 47, 1887.) So they are also, in simple and uncomplicated cases, according to Mongeri, by pregnancy.

[269] “All doctors who have patients in convents,” remarks Marro (La Puberta, p. 338), “know how hysteria dominates among them;” he adds that his own experience confirms that of Raciborski, who found that nuns devoted to the contemplative life are more liable to hysteria than those who are occupied in teaching or in nursing.  It must be added, however, that there is not unanimity as to the prevalence of hysteria in convents.  Brachet was of the same opinion as Briquet, and so considered it rare.  Imbert-Goubeyre, also (La Stigmatisation, p. 436) states that during more than forty years of medical life, though he has been connected with a number of religious communities, he has not found in them a single hysterical subject, the reason being, he remarks, that the unbalanced and extravagant are refused admission to the cloister.

[270] Parent-Duchatelet, De la Prostitution, vol. i, p. 242.

[271] It may not be unnecessary to point out that here and throughout, in speaking of the psychic mechanism of hysteria, I do not admit that any process can be purely psychic.  As Fere puts it in an admirable study of hysteria (Twentieth Century Practice of Medicine, 1897, vol. x, p. 556):  “In the genesis of hysterical troubles everything takes place as if the psychical and the somatic phenomena were two aspects of the same biological fact.”

[272] Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme Psychologique, 1889; L’Etat mental des Hysteriques, 1894; Nevroses et Idees fixes, 1898; Breuer und Freud, Studien ueber Hysterie, Vienna, 1895; the best introduction to Freud’s work is, however, to be found in the two series of his Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, published in a collected form in 1906 and 1909.  It may be added that a useful selection of Freud’s papers has lately (1909) been published in English.