The objection most frequently advanced against this result may be to the purport, that sexual assaults on little children occur too frequently to give an etiological value to its verification, or that such experiences must remain ineffectual just because they concern a sexually undeveloped being; and that one must moreover be careful not to obtrude upon the patient through the examination such alleged reminiscences or believe in the romances which they themselves fabricate. To the latter objections I hold out the request that no one should really judge with great certainty this obscure realm unless he has made use of the only method which can clear it up (the method of psychoanalysis for bringing to consciousness the hitherto unconscious[48]). The essential point in the first doubts is settled by the observation that it really is not the experiences themselves that act traumatically, but their revival as reminiscences after the individual has entered into sexual maturity. My thirteen cases of hysteria were throughout of the graver kind, they were all of long duration, and some had undergone a lengthy and unsuccessful asylum treatment. Every one of the infantile traumas which the analysis revealed for these severe cases had to be designated as marked sexual injuries; some of them were indeed abominable. Among the persons who were guilty of such serious abuse we have in the first place nurses, governesses, and other servants to whom children are left much too carelessly, then in regrettable frequency come the teachers; but in seven of the thirteen cases we dealt with innocent childish offenders, mostly brothers who for years entertained sexual relations with their younger sisters. The course of events always resembled some of the cases which could with certainty be tracked, namely, that the boy had been abused by a person of the feminine sex, thus awakening in him prematurely the libido, and that after a few years he repeated in sexual aggression on his sister the same procedures to which he himself was subjected. I must exclude active masturbation from the list of sexual injuries of early childhood as being pathogenic for hysteria. That it is so very frequently found associated with hysteria is due to the fact that masturbation in itself is more frequently the result of abuse or seduction than one supposes. It not seldom happens that both members of a childish pair later in life become afflicted by defense neuroses, the brother by obsessions and the sister by hysteria, which naturally gives the appearance of a familial neurotic predisposition. This pseudo-heredity is now and then solved in a surprising manner. I have had under observation a brother, sister, and a somewhat older cousin. The analysis which I have undertaken with the brother showed me that he suffered from reproaches for being the cause of his sister’s malady; he himself was corrupted by his cousin, concerning whom it was known in the family that he fell a victim to his nurse.