promised her to do my utmost in caring for the children, that I would not forsake them, and be a mother to them, and this promise I broke when offering my resignation.” The analysis of the subjective sensation of smell seemed completed. It was once objective and intimately connected with an experience, a small scene, in which contrary affects conflicted, sorrow at forsaking the children, and the mortification which despite all urged her to this decision. Her mother’s letter naturally recalled the motives of this decision because she thought of returning to her mother. The conflict of the affects raised this moment to a trauma and the sensation of smell which was connected with it remained as its symbol. The only thing to be explained was the fact that out of all the sensory perceptions of that scene, the perception of smell was selected as the symbol, but I was already prepared to use the chronic nasal affliction as an explanation. On being directly questioned she stated that just at that time she suffered from a severe coryza and could scarcely smell anything but in her excitement she perceived the odor of burned pastry, it penetrated the organically motived anosmia. As plausible as this sounded it did not satisfy me; there seemed to be something lacking. There was no acceptable reason wherefore this series of excitements and this conflict of affects should have led to hysteria. Why did it not all remain on a normal psychological basis? In other words, what justified the conversion under discussion? Why did she not recall the scenes themselves instead of the sensations connected with them which she preferred as symbols for her recollection? Such questions might seem superfluous and impertinent when dealing with old hysterias in whom the mechanism of conversion was habitual, but this girl first acquired hysteria through this trauma, or at least through this slight distress. From the analysis of similar cases I already knew that where hysteria is to be newly acquired one psychic determinant is indispensible; namely, that some presentation must intentionally be repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative elaboration. In this intentional repression I also find the reason for the conversion of the sum of excitement, be it partial or total. The sum of excitement which is not to enter into psychic association more readily finds the wrong road to bodily innervation. The reason for the repression itself could only be a disagreeable feeling, the incompatibility of one of the repressible ideas with the ruling presentation-mass of the ego. The repressed presentation then avenges itself by becoming pathogenic.