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December 18, 1892
IX., Berggasse 19
Dearest friend,
I am glad to be able to tell you that our theory of hysteria (reminiscence, abreaction, and the like) will appear in the Neurologisches Centralblatt1 on January 1, 1893, in the form of a detailed preliminary communication. It has cost enough in battles with my esteemed partner.2
You two lost in your happiness, what are you doing? Will we see you both here at Christmas, as rumor has it?
Most cordial greetings.
Your Sigm. Freud
Between the first and second parts of the “preliminary communication” of 1893, Freud delivered a lecture to the Wiener medizinischer Klub on January 11 of that year.
Published in the Wiener medizinische Presse of January 22 and January 29, it was a shorthand report of the lecture revised by Freud. Strachey (S.E. 3:27) translates it as “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena.”
But there is a report Strachey did not mention, published in Internationale klinische Rundschau, 7 (1893):107-110, which differs somewhat from the Presse version. At the end of the case presented in S.E. 3:34, the Rundschau adds what is clearly an authentic phrase of Freud's: “And so psychic pain often becomes transformed into physical pain.” The Rundschau account also contains a slightly different wording of Freud's famous comment in the Studies on Hysteria, “The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.” Quoted in italics in the original Rundschau report, it undoubtedly stems directly from Freud: “The hysteric suffers, therefore, from memories of psychic traumas which resulted from experiences which could not be fully abreacted, either because the hysteric denies himself one or another means of abreaction, or because the experience took place in a state which was not suitable for abreaction.”
The German Herr Compagnon is somewhat disdainful as well as humorous. Freud's relation to Breuer was a complex one. See the thorough study by Hirschmüller (1978).