To discover the hidden mechanism, one must make use of the author’s developed method of interpretation, that is, one must look for symbolic actions, lapses in speech, memory, etc., and above all, one must resort to the analysis of dreams, as they give the most direct access to the unconscious. No one is really qualified to use or judge Freud’s psychanalytic method who has not thoroughly mastered the Traumdeutung,[7] the Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben,[8] and the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie,[9] and has not had considerable experience in analyzing his own and other’s dreams and psychopathological actions. It is especially in the Traumdeutung that Freud has fully developed his psychanalytic technique and a perfect knowledge of which is the sine qua non in the treatment. It is only by following Freud in this manner that one can hope to solve the hitherto unsolved riddles of the psychoneuroses and psychoses. This treatment is more difficult than one can describe in a preface. It not only presupposes a thorough knowledge of Freud but an equal knowledge of normal and abnormal psychology. Those who have not acquired this knowledge by reason of time or otherwise may remember the words of the younger Pliny: _Ut enim de pictore scalptore fictore nisi artifex indicare, ita nisi sapiens non potest perspicere sapientem_. A. A. BRILL. CHAPTER I. THE PSYCHIC MECHANISM OF HYSTERICAL PHENOMENA.[10] (PRELIMINARY COMMUNICATION.) I. Instigated by a number of accidental observations we have investigated for a number of years the different forms and symptoms of hysteria in order to discover the cause and the process which provoked the phenomena in question for the first time, in a great many cases years back. In the great majority of cases we did not succeed in elucidating this starting point from the mere history, no matter how detailed it might have been, partly because we had to deal with experiences about which discussion was disagreeable to the patients, but mainly because they really could not recall them; often they had no inkling of the causal connection between the occasioning process and the pathological phenomenon. It was generally necessary to hypnotize the patients and reawaken the memory of that time in which the symptom first appeared, and we thus succeeded in exposing that connection in a most precise and convincing manner. This method of examination in a great number of cases has furnished us with results which seem to be of theoretical as well as of practical value.