PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL OBSERVATIONS ON TIC 13
traumatic moment: there are also, however, not unessential
dififerences between the two. In hysteria the physical symptom is
only the symbol of a mental shock with the emotion suppressed
and the memory of it repressed. In actual Tic the organic injury
is the only trauma, which is, it appears, no less qualified to leave
behind pathogenic memories than the mental conflict of hysteria.
(At any rate the relative independence of tic from actual patho-
logical alteration and its dependence on memories would go to
show that the "lasting change" that remains behind after trauma,
lies not in the periphery, in the organ itself, but in the psychical
representative of the organ.) Hysteria is a transference neurosis
in which the libidinous relation to the object (person) is repressed
and appears as a conversion-symptom, as it were an auto-erotic,
symbolisation in the body of the patient himself.¹ In Tic on the
contrary, it would seem that no relation to the object is hidden
behind the symptom; in this case the memory of the organic
trauma itself acts pathogenically.
This differentiation obliges us to introduce a complication into the scheme put forward by Freud on the building up of the "psychical systems". The psychical systems consist of simple reflex arcs in the form of unconscious, preconscious and conscious memory-systems (M-systems) interpolated between the afferent (sensory) and the efferent (motor) apparatus. Now Freud himself already accepts a plurality of such M-systems that are orientated accor- ding to the different principles of temporal, formal, or affective asso- ciation, or association of content. What I should like to introduce here is the acceptance of a particular M-system, that one would have to call the "ego-memory-system", to which fell the task of con- tinually registering the subject's own physical or mental processes. It is self-evident that this system would have a stronger develop- ment in a constitutional narcissist than in persons of completely developed object-love, but an unexpectedly powerful trauma can have the result in Tic, as in traumatic neurosis, of an over-strong memory fixation on the attitude of the body at the moment of experiencing the trauma, and that to such a degree as to provoke a perpetual or paroxysmatic reproduction of the attitude. The increased tendency of tic patients to self-observation, to attention to their endosomatic and endopsychical sensations is also remarked
¹ Compare "Hysterische Materialisationsphcinomene", in Hysterie and Pathoneurosen, by the author.
