219. "The two conditions," says Dr. Breuer, "no longer differed, as formerly, only in the fact that in the first condition she was normal and in the second practically insane. For now in her first condition she lived, like the rest of us, in the winter of 1881-82, while in her second condition she lived in the winter of 1880-81, and in that state all that had happened subsequently was clean forgotten. Only the consciousness that her father was dead seemed to persist throughout. The set-back into the past year was so definite and strong that in her new house she was subject to the hallucination of her former bedroom; and when she wished to go to the door she ran to the stove, which in her new room stood in the same place relatively to the window as the door had stood in the old room. The transition from one state to another came on spontaneously, and could also be easily summoned up by means of any sense-impression which vividly reminded her of the previous year. It was enough to hold before her an orange (oranges had been her main food in her illness), to put her back from 1882 to 1881. And this return to the past year took place in no vague or general fashion, but she lived each day through each corresponding day of the past winter.

I discovered this in two ways: in the evening's hypnosis she confessed day by day the troubles or illusions which had disturbed her on the corresponding day of 1881, and also a private diary of her mother's showed me the absolute accuracy of the external facts of the previous winter as revived in the hysterical illusion.

"It was curious to see how these revived psychical stimuli exercised an effect from the second condition upon the first or normal condition. It happened, for instance, that the patient said to me laughingly in the morning that she did not know why, but she was angry with me. Thanks to the mother's diary I found out what was the matter, and removed it by talking it out' in the evening's hypnosis. I had in point of fact greatly angered the patient on that evening in the previous year. Or she said another day that there was something wrong with her eyes; she saw colours untruly; she knew that her dress was brown, but she saw it blue. Experiment showed that she could perfectly well distinguish tints on test-papers, and that the disturbance affected only her vision of the stuff of her dress. The reason was that on that day in the previous year she had been very busy with a dressing-gown for her father, made of the same stuff as this dress, but blue instead of brown".

A most distressing inability to drink came on in the summer of 1882, and lasted for six weeks, obliging the patient to live mainly on melons, until it was discovered that this shuddering incapacity to swallow liquids was the result of a disgust experienced at a like period in 1881, at the sight of a dog allowed to drink from an acquaintance's glass. Fräulein O. had concealed this disgust at the time, out of politeness, but the unexpressed loathing had so worked itself out in her organism, as to produce a kind of hydrophobic spasm when the subliminally remembered time of year came round.

During the nights the "second condition," which still reproduced the previous year, was dominant. Consequently, since the family had changed houses since that date, the patient, if she woke in the night, was liable to greater alarm than in the day, thinking, in the loss of correction from recent memories, that she had been carried away from home. This awkwardness was averted by a suggestion from Dr. Breuer that she could not open her eyes at night; although once when she wept in her sleep her eyelids were, so to say, forced open by the tears, and she was seized with the same terror at her surroundings.

Here, as in so many cases, hypnotism showed itself the exact correlative, the specific antidote, of hysteria. Exactly the symptoms which hysteria had caused hypnotic suggestion could remedy. Exactly the puzzles which hysteria had woven hypnotic suggestion could unlock.

"The talking cure" or "chimney-sweeping," as Fräulein O. called it, was practically equivalent to confession under hypnosis. Every evening Dr. Breuer hypnotised her, and then inquired as to the origin of each symptom in turn. For each symptom there did exist such a moment of origin; often a trivial accident originating a long and serious trouble. For instance, the "macropsy and strabismus convergens" which had long troubled the patient were traced to a moment when her father asked her what time it was, and she, looking hastily while she wept, saw the dial of her watch magnified and distorted through her tears. So soon as the cause of each accident of this kind was traced and discussed, with special arguments to remove any self-blame thereto attaching, the perversion of sensibility or of motricity disappeared. The isolated, hypertrophied memory was brought back, as I have said, into the general current of the psychical circulation. It is as though the past passage of life was re-lived, and altered in the re-living.