My experiences during the last two years have strengthened my predilection for making the defense the essential point in the psychic mechanism of the mentioned neuroses, and on the other hand have permitted me to give a clinical foundation to the psychological theory. To my surprise I have discovered some simple but sharply circumscribed solutions for the problem of the neuroses which I shall provisionally briefly report in the following pages. It would be inconsistent with this manner of reporting to add to the assertions the required proofs, but I hope to be able to fulfill this obligation in a comprehensive discussion. I. THE “SPECIFIC” ETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA. That the symptoms of hysteria become comprehensible only through a reduction to “traumatically” effective experiences, and that these psychic traumas refer to the sexual life has already been asserted by Breuer and me in former publications. What I have to add today as a uniform result of thirteen analyzed cases of hysteria concerns, on the one hand, the nature of these sexual traumas, and on the other, the period of life in which they occurred. An experience occurring at any period of life, touching in any way the sexual life, and then becoming pathogenic through the liberation and suppression of a painful affect is not sufficient for the causation of hysteria. It must on the contrary belong to the sexual traumas of early childhood (the period of life before puberty), and its content must consist in a real irritation of the genitals (coitus-like processes). This specific determination of hysteria—sexual passivity in pre-sexual periods—I have found fulfilled in all analyzed cases of hysteria (among which were two men). To what extent the determination of the accidental etiological moment diminishes the requirement of the hereditary predisposition needs only be intimated. We can, moreover, understand the disproportionately greater frequency of hysteria in the female sex, as even in childhood this sex is more subject to sexual assaults.