All hysterical attacks which I have been thus far able to examine proved to be such involuntary incursions of day dreams. Observation leaves no doubt that such fancies may exist as unconscious or conscious and whenever they become unconscious they may also become pathogenic, that is, they may express themselves in symptoms and attacks. Under favorable conditions it is possible for consciousness to seize such unconscious fancies. One of my patients whose attention I have called to her fancies narrated that once while in the street she suddenly found herself in tears, and rapidly reflecting over the cause of her weeping the fancy became clear to her. She fancied herself in delicate relationship with a piano virtuoso familiar in the city, but whom she did not know personally. In her fancy she bore him a child (she was childless), and he then deserted her, leaving her and her child in misery. At this passage of the romance she burst into tears. The unconscious fancies are either from the first unconscious, having been formed in the unconscious, or what is more frequently the case they were once conscious fancies, day dreams, and were then intentionally forgotten, merging into the unconscious by “repression.” Their content then either remained the same or underwent a transformation, so that the present unconscious fancy represents a descendant of the once conscious one. The unconscious fancy stands in a very important relation to the sexual life of the person, it is really identical with that fancy which helped it towards sexual gratification during a period of masturbation. The masturbating act (in the broader sense the onanistic) then consisted of two parts, the evocation of the fancy, and the active performance of self gratification at the height of the same. This combination is familiarly in itself a soldering.[61] Originally this action was a purely auto-erotic undertaking for the pleasure obtained from a certain so called erogenous part of the body. Later this action blended with a wish presentation from the sphere of the object loved, and served for a partial realization of the situation in which this fancy culminated. If, then, the person forgoes in this manner the masturbo-fantastic gratification, the action remains undone, the fancy, however, changes from a conscious to an unconscious one. If no other manner of sexual gratification occurs, if the person remains abstinent and does not succeed in sublimating his libido, that is, in diverting the sexual excitement to a higher aim, we then have the conditions for the refreshment of the unconscious fancy; it grows exuberantly and with all the force of the desire for love at least a fragment of its content becomes a morbid symptom.