ABSTRACT
Freud first proposed the now well-known thesis that hysterics suffered "mainly from reminiscences" in his Preliminary Communication to the Studies on Hysteria. Initially Freud thought that traumatic memories would be easily accessible by patients during treatment, but things turned out not to be so simple. Freud's initial attempt to penetrate the meaning of his Irma dream can be found in the opening chapter of his unfinished "Project for a scientific psychology", which Freud sent to Fliess in manuscript at the end of September of 1895, two months after the Irma dream. Freud observed that the objection to his idea was that "sexual assaults on small children happened too often for them to have any aetiological importance". Despite limitations, Freud's theoretical work was unquestionably a momentous achievement in the history of human thought.
