This is a four page manuscript dated November 1892. Some of its paragraphs are included in Breuer and Freud's first short publication ber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänmonene, 1893.

It is surprising in this very interesting short paper to see to what an extent Freud's later psychoanalytic discoveries are implicit. This paper establishes that the hysterical attack expresses an unconscious memory; that this memory is a repetition of the psychic trauma which was the basis of the hysteria. The conditions which decide whether an experience has a 'traumatic' effect are either a tendency to suppress this experience, or a certain psychic state ('affect, ecstasy, auto-hypnosis'); and that the hysterical seizure is a discharge of impressions whose normal discharge has been prohibited.