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Since the discovery of Freud that the neuroses have a psychic source, and are therefore amenable to psychotherapy, a good many borderland diseases—-generally lumped together as nervous—have been submitted to the same psychoanalytical test and been found curable by this method. Here belong asthma, the tics, and what has hitherto been vaguely described as hysteroepilepsy. The name hysteroepilepsy has only been a clock for our ignorance, since epilepsy could not always be distinguished from a hysterical fit. As a matter of fact, to-day we are still less in a position to make a differential diagnosis between true epilepsy and the hysterical epileptiform attack, since it is known that cases having all the appearance of epilepsy have been cured by psychoanalysis, and were thus proved to be neurotic epileptiform fits. All we can do at present is to choose for psychoanalytical treatment those cases that have not yet become chronic, and which, by their medical history, absence of accident, late appearance in life, etc., seem to exclude genuine Jacksonian epilepsy; and judge by results.
The following case is a typical example of fits, which recurred at regular intervals, frequently at night, which had lasted ten months, and which in their symptomatology were not distinguishable from true epilepsy, though they proved to be entirely curable by psychoanalysis.
The patient is a tailor, 22 years old, who was in the army without ever getting out of England. He got his first fit three months after demobilization. After his discharge he had been doing night work as a shipping clerk, and felt very exhausted from his unusual work. One day, whilst walking out, he felt very much upset by the noise of the tramcars: it seemed to be going “right through him.” He went along for some distance, but was very shaky, as if in a maze. As he came under a railway bridge, the noise of a train passing overhead stunned him altogether; he collapsed, and was brought home unconscious. Since then, the tenden