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previous year with such intensity that
in the new house she hallucinated her old room, so that when she
wanted to go to the door she knocked up against the stove which
stood in the same relation to the window as the door did in the old
room. The change-over from one state to another occurred
spontaneously but could also be very easily brought about by any
sense-impression which vividly recalled the previous year. One had
only to hold up an orange before her eyes (oranges were what she
had chiefly lived on during the first part of her illness) in order
to carry her over from the year 1882 to the year 1881. But this
transfer into the past did not take place in a general or
indefinite manner; she lived through the previous winter day by
day. I should only have been able to suspect that this was
happening, had it not been that every evening during the hypnosis
she talked through whatever it was that had excited her on the same
day in 1881, and had it not been that a private diary kept by her
mother in 1881 confirmed beyond a doubt the occurrence of the
underlying events. This re-living of the previous year continued
till the illness came to its final close in June, 1882.
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    32
     
       It was interesting here, too, to
observe the way in which these revived psychical stimuli belonging
to her secondary state made their way over into her first, more
normal one. It happened, for instance, that one morning the patient
said to me laughingly that she had no idea what was the matter but
she was angry with me. Thanks to the diary I knew what was
happening; and, sure enough, this was gone through again in the
evening hypnosis: I had annoyed the patient very much on the same
evening in 1881. Or another time she told me there was something
the matter with her eyes; she was seeing colours wrong. She knew
she was wearing a brown dress but she saw it as a blue one. We soon
found that she could distinguish all the colours of the visual
test-sheets correctly and clearly, and that the disturbance only
related to the dress-material. The reason was that during the same
period in 1881 she had been very busy with a dressing-gown for her
father, which was made with the same material as her present dress,
but was blue instead of brown. Incidentally, it was often to be
seen that these emergent memories showed their effect in advance;
the disturbance of her normal state would occur earlier on, and the
memory would only gradually be awakened in her condition
seconde .
     
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    Studies On Hysteria
    33
     
       Her evening hypnosis was thus
heavily burdened, for we had to talk off not only her contemporary
imaginative products but also the events and
‘vexations’¹ of 1881. (Fortunately I had already
relieved her at the time of the imaginative products of that year.)
But in addition to all this the work that had to be done by the
patient and her physician was immensely increased by a third group
of separate disturbances which had to be disposed of in the same
manner. These were the psychical events involved in the period of
incubation of the illness between July and December, 1880; it was
they that had produced the whole of the hysterical phenomena, and
when they were brought to verbal utterance the symptoms
disappeared.
       When this happened for the first
time - when, as a result of an accidental and spontaneous utterance
of this kind, during the evening hypnosis, a disturbance which had
persisted for a considerable time vanished - I was greatly
surprised. It was in the summer during a period of extreme heat,
and the patient was suffering very badly from thirst; for, without
being able to account for it in any way, she suddenly found it
impossible to drink. She would take up the glass of water she
longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it
away like some one suffering from hydrophobia. As she did this, she
was obviously in an absence for a couple of seconds. She
lived only on fruit, such as melons,