I myself surmise that the so frequently fabricated assaults of hysterical persons are obsessional confabulations emanating from the memory traces of infantile traumas. Footnote 49: In an article on the anxiety neurosis (Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1895, Nr. 2) I stated that “an anxiety neurosis which can almost typically be combined with hysteria can be evoked in maturing girls at the first encounter with the sexual problem.” I know today that the occasion in which such virginal anxiety breaks out does not really correspond to the first encounter with sexuality, but that in such persons there was in childhood a precedent experience of sexual passivity which memory was awakened at the “first encounter.” Footnote 50: A psychological theory of the repression ought also to inform us why only ideas of a sexual content can be repressed. It may be formulated as follows: It is known that ideas of a sexual content produce exciting processes in the genitals resembling the actual sexual experience. It may be assumed that this somatic excitement becomes transformed into psychic. As a rule the activity referred to is much stronger at the time of the occurrence than at the recollection of the same. But if the sexual experience takes place during the time of sexual immaturity and the recollection of the same is awakened during or after maturity, the recollection then acts disproportionately more exciting than the previous experience, for puberty has in the mean time incomparably increased the reactive capacity of the sexual apparatus. But such an inverse proportion seems to contain the psychological determination of repression. Through the retardation of the pubescent maturity in comparison with the psychic function, the sexual life offers the only existing possibility for that inversion of the relative efficacy. The infantile traumas subsequently act like fresh experiences, but they are then unconscious. Deeper psychological discussions I will have to postpone for another time. I moreover call attention to the fact that the here considered time of “sexual maturity” does not coincide with puberty, but occurs before the same (eight to ten years). Footnote 51: