was then the idea, during the attack you thought of your friend, her death must have made a great impression on you.”—“Yes, indeed, I recall now that I felt dreadful when I heard of her death, to think that I should go to a ball while she lay dead, but I anticipated so much pleasure at the ball and was so occupied with the invitation that I did not wish to think of this sad event.” (Notice here the intentional repression from consciousness which caused the reminiscences of her friend to become pathogenic.) The attack was now in a measure explained, but I still needed the occasional moment which just then provoked this recollection, and accidentally I formed a happy supposition about it.—“Can you recall through which street you passed at that time?”—“Surely, the main street with its old houses, I can see it now.”—“And where did your friend live?”—“In the same street. I had just passed her house and was two houses farther when I was seized with the attack.”—“Then it was the house which you passed that recalled your dead friend, and the contrast which you then did not wish to think about that again took possession of you.” Still I was not satisfied, perhaps there was something else which provoked or strengthened the hysterical disposition in a hitherto normal girl. My suppositions were directed to the menstrual indisposition as an appropriate moment, and I asked, “Do you know when during that month you had your menses?”—She became indignant: “Do you expect me to know that? I only know that I had them then very rarely and irregularly. When I was seventeen I only had them once.”—“Well let us enumerate the days, months, etc., so as to find when it occurred.”—She with certainty decided on a month and wavered between two days preceding a date which accompanied a fixed holiday.—Does that in any way correspond with the time of the ball?—She answered quietly: “The ball was on this holiday. And now I recall that I was impressed by the fact that the only menses which I had had during the year occurred just when I had to go to the ball. It was the first invitation to a ball that I had received.” The combination of the events can now be readily constructed and the mechanism of this hysterical attack readily viewed. To be sure the result was gained after painstaking labor. It necessitated on my side full confidence in the technique and individual directing ideas in order to reawaken such details of forgotten experiences after twenty-one years in a sceptical and awakened patient. But then everything agreed. Footnote 15: