Letter from Freud to Fliess, May 2, 1897

Vienna, May 2, 1897

Dear Wilhelm,

In the interim, received postcard and telegram and regret that the congress did not bring you what it brought me — pleasure and renewal.

Since then I have been in a continual euphoria and have been working like a young man. As you will gather from the enclosure [Draft L], my acquisitions are becoming consolidated. In the first place, I have gained a sure inkling of the structure of hysteria. Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes. Some can be obtained directly, others always by way of fantasies set up in front of them. The fantasies stem from things that have been heard but understood subsequently, and all their material is of course genuine. They are protective structures, sublimations of the facts, embellishments of them, and at the same time serve for self-relief. Their accidental origin is perhaps from masturbation fantasies. A second important piece of insight tells me that the psychic structures which, in hysteria, are affected by repression are not in reality memories — since no one indulges in memory activity without a motive — but impulses that derive from primal scenes.1 I realize now that all three neuroses (hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia) exhibit the same elements (along with the same etiology) — namely, memory fragments, impulses (derived from memories), and protective fictions; but the breakthrough into consciousness, the formation of compromises (that is, of symptoms), occurs in them at different points. In hysteria, it is the memories; in obsessional neurosis, the perverse impulses; in paranoia, the protective fictions (fantasies) which penetrate into normal life amid distortions because of compromise.

In this I see a great advance in insight. I hope it strikes you in the same way.

Another confirmation of my protohysteria scenes. In the case of G., I discerned several weeks ago that his mild depression copies a mild depression of his father, which occurred when he himself was not yet quite 2 y