Letter 611 from Extract from the Fliess Papers

… As you will gather from the enclosure [Draft L], my gains are becoming consolidated. In the first place, I have gained a sure notion of the structure of hysteria. Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes, some of which can be arrived at directly, but others always by way of phantasies set up in front of them. The phantasies are derived from things that have been heard but understood subsequently and all their material is, of course, genuine. They are protective structures, sublimations2 of the facts, embellishments of them, and at the same time serve for self-exoneration. Their precipitating origin is perhaps from masturbation phantasies. A second important piece of insight tells me that the psychical structures which, in hysteria, are affected by repression are not in reality memories-since no one indulges in mnemic activity without a motive-but impulses3 which arise from the primal scenes [see p. 230 above].4 I realize now that all three neuroses (hysteria, obsessional neurosis and paranoia) exhibit the same elements (along with the same aetiology)-namely, mnemic fragments, impulses (derived