materially involves the function. After this digression let us return to Breuer's case. Since there was no organic cause for the disturbance, the case was clearly to be regarded as hysterical, that is, psychogenic. Dr. Breuer had noticed that if during her twilight-states (whether spontaneous or artificially induced) he let the patient freely express the reminiscences and phantasies that thronged in upon her, her condition was afterwards much improved for some hours. He made systematic use of this observation in her further treatment. The patient herself invented the appropriate name for it of "talking cure" or, in jest, "chimney sweeping." Her illness began whilst she was nursing her dying father. It is easy to understand that her phantasies busied themselves mainly with this disturbing time. In the twilight-states memories of this period reappeared with photographic fidelity, distinct in every detail: no waking recollection is ever so plastically and exactly reproduced. The term hypermnesia is applied to this heightening of the power of memory, which occurs without difficulty in certain states of contracted consciousness. Remarkable things now came to light. Out of the many things told, one ran somewhat as follows.[223] On a certain night she was in a state of great anxiety about her father's high temperature. She sat by his bed, waiting for the surgeon who was coming from Vienna to perform an operation. Her mother had gone out of the room for a little while, and Anna (the patient) sat by the bed, with her right arm hanging over the back of her chair. She fell into a kind of waking-dream in which she saw a black snake come out from the wall and approach the sick man, prepared to bite. (It is very probable that some real snakes had been seen in the fields behind the house, and that she had been frightened by them; this would furnish the material for her hallucination.) She wanted to drive the creature away, but felt paralysed; her right arm, hanging over the chair, had "gone to sleep," was anæsthetic and paretic, and as she looked her fingers turned into little snakes with death's heads (the nails). Probably she tried to drive the snake away with her paralysed right hand, and thereby the anæsthesia and paralysis became associated with the snake-hallucination. Even after the snake had disappeared, her terror remained great. She tried to pray, but found she had no words in any language, until at length she managed to remember some English nursery rhymes, and then she could go on thinking and praying in that language. This was the actual scene in which the paralysis and speech-disturbance arose; the describing it served to remove the speech-trouble, and in this same fashion the case was finally completely cured.