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(a) German Edition: 1886 Wien. med. Wschr., 36 (49), 1633-38. (December 4.)
This paper seems never to have been reprinted. The present translation, by James Strachey, is the first into English. It was apparently intended that this should be the first of a series of papers, since there is a superscription which reads ‘Beiträge zur Kasuistik der Hysterie, I’ (Contributions to the Clinical Study of Hysteria, I). But the series was not continued.
On October 15, 1886, some six months after his return from Paris, Freud read a paper before the Vienna ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’ (Society of Medicine) with the title ‘Über männliche Hysterie’ (On Male Hysteria). The text of this paper has not survived, though reports of it appeared in the Vienna medical periodicals: for instance, in the Wien. med. Wochenschr., 36 (43), 1444-6 (October 23). It is also shortly summarized by Ernest Jones (1953, 252). Freud himself gives an account of the occasion in his Autobiographical Study (1925d), Standard Ed., 20, 15. The paper was badly received, and Meynert challenged Freud to present a case of male hysteria before the society. He met with some difficulty in finding one, since the senior physicians of the departments in the General Hospital refused to allow him to use their material. Eventually, with the help of a young laryngologist, he found a suitable patient elsewhere, and presented him before the ‘Gesellschaft der Aerzte’ on November 26, 1886. The case was demonstrated by Freud and by his friend Dr. Königstein, the ophthalmic surgeon, who had made an examination of the patient's eye symptoms. The latter's paper was printed in the Wochenschrift a week later than Freud's in the issue of December 11 (1674-6). Freud tells us that the present paper met with a better reception than its predecessor, but nevertheless failed t