The authors discuss the influence of Charcot's views on Freud's early theory of hysteria and of psychic trauma. Charcot felt that traumatic hysteria and male hysteria are identical. Freud's two 1886 lectures on male hysteria, delivered upon his return from France, foreshadowed his later ideas on the role of trauma in the pathogenesis of hysteria. Specifically, he discussed the idea that each hysterical symptom is due to a psychic trauma reviving an earlier traumatic event—the principle of deferred action. The authors suggest that these early ideas provide a valuable historical context for the present-day interest in the traumatic origins of so-called multiple personality syndrome, posttraumatic stress disorders, and other dissociative disorders.