ABSTRACT
In many cases of anxiety hysteria and of hysterical impotence, the author found that the analysis went smoothly up to a certain point. The patients had full insight but the therapeutic result was always delayed; the ideas even began to repeat themselves with a certain monotony, as though the patient had nothing more to say, as though their unconscious were exhausted. This, of course—had it been true—would have contradicted the psycho-analytic theory of the unconscious origins of the neuroses. Prof. Freud advised the author that after a certain time one must call upon anxiety hysterics to give up their phobically strengthened inhibitions and to attempt to do just what they are most afraid of. The physician can justify such advice to himself, as to the patient, in this way, that each such attempt brings to the surface untouched psycho-analytic material that without this shaking up could only have been obtained much later or not at all.
