If the account I have so far given has led the reader to expect that the _Studien über Hysterie_ must, in all essentials of their material content, be the product of Breuer’s mind, that is precisely what I myself have always maintained and what it has been my aim to repeat here. As regards the theory put forward in the book, I was partly responsible, but to an extent which it is today no longer possible to determine. That theory was in any case unpretentious and hardly went beyond the direct description of the observations. It did not seek to establish the nature of hysteria but merely to throw light upon the origin of its symptoms. Thus it laid stress upon the significance of the life of the emotions and upon the importance of distinguishing between mental acts which are unconscious and those which are conscious (or rather capable of being conscious); it introduced a dynamic factor, by supposing that a symptom arises through the damming-up of an effect, and an economic factor, by regarding that same symptom as the product or equivalent of a quantity of energy which would otherwise have been employed in some other way. (This latter process was described as _conversion_.) Breuer spoke of our method as _cathartic_; its therapeutic aim was explained as being to provide that the accumulated affect used for maintaining the symptom, which had got onto the wrong lines and had, as it were, become stuck there, should be directed onto the normal path along which it could obtain discharge (or _abreaction_). The practical results of the cathartic procedure were excellent. Its defects, which became evident later, were those of all forms of hypnotic treatment. There are still a number of psychotherapists who have not gone beyond catharsis as Breuer understood it and who still speak in its favor. Its value as an abridged method of treatment was shown afresh in the hands of E. Simmel in the treatment of war neuroses in the German army during the Great War. The theory of catharsis had not much to say on the subject of sexuality. In the case histories which I contributed to the _Studien_, sexual factors played a certain part, but scarcely more attention was paid to them than to other emotional excitations. Breuer wrote of the girl, who has since become famous as his first patient, that her sexual side was extraordinarily undeveloped. It would have been difficult to guess from the _Studien über Hysterie_ what an importance sexuality has in the ætiology of the neuroses.