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traumatic affects unable to get abreacted were converted into physical symptoms. These symptoms found physical expression but they are not physical in origin, they only serve to - symbolically – express the event that triggered the development of hysteria. The path to remembering the initiating event had been cut off, dissociated from waking consciousness. Freud wrote: “In traumatic neuroses the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affect of fright—the psychical trauma. In an analogous manner, our investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas. Any experience which calls up distressing affects—such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain—may operate as a trauma of this kind” (Freud and Breuer 1895, pp.5-6). Ideas and wishful impulses, which are conflicting with other values, if suppressed, can lead to symptoms. In 1894, Freud formulated an initial conflict model for the formation of conversion symptoms in hysteria, obsessional neuroses, and phobias, which he summed up under the term neuro-psychoses of defence (Freud 1894a,b). In contrast to conflict formation, in neuro-psychoses of defence, Freud understood the symptoms of actual neuroses including anxiety neurosis and neurasthenia (Freud 1894c; Freud 1898), not as an expression of a normally functioning mental process but as a direct result of a toxic libido transformation caused by inadequately discharged sexual energy. Furthermore, it became clear to him that the incompatible ideas of his female patients “arise chiefly on the soil of sexual experience and sensation” (Freud 1894a, p. 47). He additionally found that these ideas were connected to early childhood experiences and concluded that his patients must have suffered from sexual seduction by an adult (Freud 1896, p.203). Accordingly, hysterical symptoms are direct descendants of unconsciously operating memories of these experiences, which - retroactively – resurge and become fully effective when triggered by current events. He further pointed out that the pathogenic nature of these childhood events only existed as long as they remained unconscious (ibid, 211). But then – in his famous letter to Wilhelm Fliess from September 21st in 1897 – he wrote: “I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses]” (Freud, 1897, p. 259). His “certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect” led Freud to doubt his seduction-theory (ibid, p. 260). Due to the analysis of his own dreams, Freud formulated a crucial insight on October 15, 1897: “A single thought of general value has been revealed to me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical. […] Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfilment here transplanted into reality, with the whole quota of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.” (ibid, p. 265). But, soon after, he again reported concussive cases of sexual violence and in a letter to Fliess he proclaimed (quoting Goethe`s Mignon) “a new motto: What has been done to you, you poor child?” (Freud 1897, p. 289; Goethe 1795/96). Never completely abandoning trauma
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