as she partly believes, is being forced on her, but which, in reality, corresponds with the deepest wish of her nature. That is why women in a hysterical attack are so easily seduced. The "attitudes passionelles" of the hysterical are merely passionate repudiations of sexual desire, which are loud merely because they are not real, and are more plaintive than at other times because the danger is greater. It is easy to understand why the sexual experiences of the time preceding puberty play so large a part in acute hysteria. The influence of extraneous moral views can be imposed comparatively easily on the child, as they have little to overcome in the almost unawakened state of the sexual inclinations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences, reinterprets them in the light of the new contents of consciousness, and the crisis takes place. The different forms that the paroxysms assume and their shifting nature are due very largely to the fact that the subject does not admit the true cause, the presence of a sexual desire, any consciousness of it being attributed by her to some extraneous influence, some self that is not her "real self."
Medical observation or interpretation of hysteria is wrong; it allows itself to be deceived by the patients, who in turn deceive themselves. It is not the rejecting ego but the rejected which is the true and original nature of the hysterical patients, however much they pretend to themselves and others that it is foreign to them.
If the rejecting ego were really their natural ego they could act in opposition to the disturbing element which they say is foreign to them, and be fully conscious of it, and differentiate and recognise it in their memory. But the fraud is evident, because the rejecting ego is only borrowed, and they lack the courage to look their own desire in the face, although something seems to say that it is the real, inborn, and only powerful one they have. Even the desire itself has no real identity, for it is not seated in a real individual, and, as it is suppressed, leaps, so to speak, from one part of the body to the other. It may be that my attempt
