Vienna, May 30, 1896

Dear Wilhelm,

As the fruit of some tormenting reflections, I send you the following solution to the etiology of the psychoneuroses, which still awaits confirmation from individual analyses.

Four periods of life are to be distinguished:

A and B (from about 8 to 10 and 13 to 17) are the transitional periods, during which repression for the most part occurs.

The arousal in a later epoch of a sexual memory from an earlier one produces a surplus of sexuality in the psyche, which operates as an inhibitor of thought and gives the memory and its consequences an obsessive character—uninhibitability.

The period Ia has the characteristic of being untranslated, so that the arousal of a Ia sexual scene leads, not to psychic consequences,