II.
It would seem at first rather surprising that long-forgotten experiences should effect so intensively, and that their recollections should not be subject to the decay into which all our memories merge. We will perhaps gain some understanding of these facts by the following examinations.
The blurring or loss of an affect of memory depends on a great many factors. In the first place it is of great consequence whether there was an energetic reaction to the affectful experience or not. By reaction we here understand a whole series of voluntary or involuntary reflexes, from crying to an act of revenge, through which according to experience affects are discharged. If the success of this reaction is of sufficient strength it results in the disappearance of a great part of the affect. Language attests this fact of daily observation, in such expressions as “to give vent to one’s feeling,” to be “relieved by weeping,” etc.
If the reaction is suppressed the affect remains united with the memory. An insult retaliated, be it only in words, is differently recalled than one that had to be taken in silence. Language also recognizes this distinction between the psychic and physical results and designates most characteristically the silently endured suffering as “grievance.” The reaction of the person injured to the trauma has really no perfect “cathartic” effect unless it is an adequate reaction like revenge. But man finds a substitute for this action in speech through which help the affect can well nigh be ab-reacted[[13]] (“abreagirt”). In other cases talking in the form of deploring and giving vent to the torments of the secret (confession) is in itself an adequate reflex. If such reaction does not result through deeds, words, or in the lightest case through weeping, the memory of the occurrence retains above all the affective accentuation.
The ab-reaction (abreagiren), however, is not the only form of discharge at the disposal of the normal psychic mechanism of the healthy person who has experienced a psychic trauma. The memory of the trauma even where it has not been ab-reacted enters into the great complex of the association. It joins the other experiences which are perhaps antagonistic to it and thus undergoes correction through the other ideas. For example, after an accident the memory of the danger and (dimmed) repetition of the fright is accompanied by the recollection of the further course, the rescue, and the consciousness of present security. The memory of a grievance may be corrected by a rectification of the state of affairs by reflecting upon one’s own dignity and similar things. Thus the normal person is able to cause a disappearance of the accompanying affect by means of association.
In addition there appears that general blurring of impressions, that fading of memories which we call “forgetting,” and which above all wears out the affective ideas no longer active.
It follows from our observations that those memories which become the causes of hysterical phenomena have been preserved for a long time with wonderful freshness and with their perfect emotional tone. As a further striking and a later realizable fact we have to mention that the patients do not perhaps have the same control of these as of their other memories of life. On the contrary, these experiences are either completely lacking from the memory of the patients in their usual psychic state or at most exist greatly abridged. Only after the patients are questioned in the hypnotic state do these memories appear with the undiminished vividness of fresh occurrences. Thus one of our patients in a hypnotic state reproduced with hallucinatory vividness throughout half a year all that excited her during an acute hysteria on the same days of the preceding year. Her mother’s diary which was unknown to the patient proved the faultless accuracy of the reproduction. Another patient, partly in hypnosis and partly in spontaneous attacks, went through with a hallucinatory distinctness all experiences of a hysterical psychosis which she passed through ten years before and for the greatest part of which she was amnesic until its reappearance. She also showed with surprising integrity and sentient force some etiologically important memories of fifteen to twenty-five years’ duration which on their return acted with the full affective force of new experiences.
The reason for this we can only find in the fact that in all the aforesaid relations these memories assume an exceptional position in reference to disappearance. It was really shown that these memories correspond to traumas which were not sufficiently ab-reacted to (“abreagirt”). On closer investigation of the reasons for this prevention we can find at least two series of determinants through which the reaction to the trauma was discontinued.
To the first group we add those cases in which the patient has not reacted to psychic traumas because the nature of the trauma precluded a reaction as in the case of an irremediable loss of a beloved person or because social relations made the reaction impossible, or because it concerned things which the patient wished to forget and which he therefore intentionally inhibited and repressed from his conscious memory. It is just those painful things which in the hypnotic state are found to be the basis of hysterical phenomena (hysterical delirium of saints, nuns, abstinent women, and well-bred children).
The second series of determinants is not conditioned by the content of the memories but by the psychic states with which the corresponding experiences in the patient have united. As a cause of hysterical symptoms one really finds in hypnosis presentations which are insignificant in themselves but which owe their preservation to the fact that they originated during a severe paralyzing affect like fright or directly in abnormal psychic conditions, as in the semi-hypnotic dreamy states of reveries, in autohypnosis and similar states. Here it is the nature of these conditions which make a reaction to the incident impossible.
To be sure both determinants may unite, and as a matter of fact they often do. This is the case when a trauma in itself effective occurs in a state of a powerful paralyzing affect or in a transformed consciousness. But due to the psychic trauma it may also happen that in many persons one of these abnormal states occurs which in turn makes a reaction impossible.
What is common to both groups of determinants is the fact that those psychic traumas which are not rectified by reaction are also prevented from adjustment by associative elaboration. In the first group it is due to the resolution of the patient who wishes to forget the painful experiences and in this way, if possible, to exclude them from association, and in the second group the associative elaboration does not succeed because there is no productive associative relationship between the normal and pathological state of consciousness in which these presentations originated. We shall soon have occasion to discuss more fully these relationships.
Hence we can say, that the reason why the pathogenically formed presentations retain their freshness and affective force is because they are not subject to the normal waste through ab-reaction and reproduction in conditions of uninhibited association.