ABSTRACT
According to S. Freud's theory, the symptoms of hysteria are based upon emotionally charged memories which mainly belong to the sphere of sexuality, and which can be traced back to the earliest infancy of the individual. Freud originally taught that every case of hysteria can be traced to a psychosexual trauma in pre-puberty. In people who later develop hysteria, signs of abnormal sexuality are to be found in childhood. In the symptoms of dementia praecox the authors find the same material used as in hysteria; in both cases sexuality plays a dominant role, in both the same psychic mechanisms are at work. It is difficult to decide whether every case of dementia praecox contains infantile sexual material, or whether this is only true for a limited number of cases. In dementia praecox the phantasy systems revolving around sexuality are predominantly symbolical. Those states in which disturbances of concentration occur are particularly prone to symbol-formation.
