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evidence of the pathogenic and exciting effect brought
about by the ideational complexes which were produced during her absences , or condition seconde , and of the fact that
these complexes were disposed of by being given verbal expression
during hypnosis. During this interval no ‘talking cure’
had been carried out, for it was impossible to persuade her to
confide what she had to say to anyone but me - not even to Dr. B.
to whom she had in other respects become devoted. I found her in a
wretched moral state, inert, unamenable, ill-tempered, even
malicious. It became plain from her evening stories that her
imaginative and poetic vein was drying up. What she reported was
more and more concerned with her hallucinations and, for instance,
the things that had annoyed her during the past days. These were
clothed in imaginative shape, but were merely formulated in
stereotyped images rather than elaborated into poetic productions.
But the situation only became tolerable after I had arranged for
the patient to be brought back to Vienna for a week and evening
after evening made her tell me three to five stories. When I had
accomplished this, everything that had accumulated during the weeks
of my absence had been worked off. It was only now that the former
rhythm was re-established: on the day after her giving verbal
utterance to her phantasies she was amiable and cheerful, on the
second day she was more irritable and less agreeable and on the
third positively ‘nasty’. Her moral state was a
function of the time that had elapsed since her last utterance.
This was because every one of the spontaneous products of her
imagination and every event which had been assimilated by the
pathological part of her mind persisted as a psychical stimulus
until it had been narrated in her hypnosis, after which it
completely ceased to operate.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    31
     
       When, in the autumn, the patient
returned to Vienna (though to a different house from the one in
which she had fallen ill), her condition was bearable, both
physically and mentally; for very few of her experiences - in fact
only her more striking ones - were made into psychical stimuli in a
pathological manner. I was hoping for a continuous and increasing
improvement, provided that the permanent burdening of her mind with
fresh stimuli could be prevented by her giving regular verbal
expression to them. But to begin with I was disappointed. In
December there was a marked deterioration of her psychical
condition. She once more became excited, gloomy and irritable. She
had no more ‘really good days’ even when it was
impossible to detect anything that was remaining
‘stuck’ inside her. To wards the end of December, at
Christmas time, she was particularly restless, and for a whole week
in the evenings she told me nothing new but only the imaginative
products which she had elaborated under the stress of great anxiety
and emotion during the Christmas of 1880. When the scenes had been
completed she was greatly relieved.
       A year had now passed since she
had been separated from her father and had taken to her bed, and
from this time on her condition became clearer and was systematized
in a very peculiar manner. Her alternating states of consciousness,
which were characterized by the fact that, from morning onwards,
her absences (that is to say, the emergence of her condition seconde ) always became more frequent as the day
advanced and took entire possession by the evening - these
alternating states had differed from each other previously in that
one (the first) was normal and the second alienated; now, however,
they differed further in that in the first she lived, like the rest
of us, in the winter of 1881-2, whereas in the second she lived in
the winter of 1880-1, and had completely forgotten all the
subsequent events. The one thing that nevertheless seemed to remain
conscious most of the time was the fact that her father had died.
She was carried back to the