When the analyst reconstructs a traumatic experience before it has become conscious the patient reacts sometimes by remembering circumstantial details of that experience. Apparently harmless details which are provoked in this way may lead to the traumatic experience itself. They play emotionally a rôle analogous to the derivatives such as penis envy in the life of a grown-up patient. The derivatives are to be dealt with first. The author supposes that analyzing such derivatives or circumstantial details which have become conscious, changes the relation of quantities of 'energy' attached to them and to the original traumatic experience, and that this change of cathexis promotes the discovery of the traumatic experience itself.

The author is not concerned with the increase of resistance which is produced by interpretations hitting repressed contents before the defenses are destroyed and which remains very often hidden behind an obedient intellectual accepting.