216. The above examples, which might be greatly multiplied, especially from French sources will suffice to give a notion of dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight than formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these hospital observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of hysteria. Dealing almost exclusively with a certain class of patients, they leave almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally instructive for our study.

Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic explorer's frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a function of two variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious stimulus. In the case of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the inborn power of resistance may be unusually great, and yet the stimulus may be so excessive that that power may be overcome. Arctic explorers have generally, of course, been among the most robust of men. And with some hysterics there is an even closer connection between initial strength and destructive malady. For it has often happened that the very feelings which we regard as characteristically civilised, characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness and delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish clown can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to sexual passion. The instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty are responsible for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a relatively feeble organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and the love of God are responsible for many more.

And why should it not be so? There exist for many men and women stimuli far stronger than self-esteem or bodily desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas and emotions whose relation to the conservation of the race or of the individual is indirect and obscure. Feelings which may once have been utilitarian have developed wholly out of proportion to any advantage which they can gain for their possessor in the struggle for life. The dangers which are now most shudderingly felt are often no real risks to life or fortune. The aims most ardently pursued are often worse than useless for man regarded as a mere over-runner of the earth.

There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of human character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex perturbation of personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the conviction that there is nothing before us but a study of decay. As I have more than once found need to maintain, it is his steady advance, and not his occasional regression, which makes the chief concern of man.

To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud (in, e. g., their Studien über Hysteric, Leipzig, 1895) have made valuable contribution. Drawing their patients not from hospital wards, but from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter, and the penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish but powerful passions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds previously well-fortified both by principle and by education. A somewhat detailed account of two of these cases may serve my purpose in this chapter in more ways than one. In the first case we shall see the insistent idea in its most interesting form, midway between the unreachable subliminal reminiscences, which give the signal (as in Janet's cases) for hysterical attacks, and the supraliminal and recognised idee fixe, which is the torment of many waking existences. Nowhere have we a better example of the mutual convertibility of moral and physical sensations - the way in which an emotional idea may be symbolised for the sufferer by the affection of an external sense.

Here is the converse process to psycho-therapeutics, a kind of psychical self-infection - self-suggestion in a powerful and a noxious form.

In the second case to be here analysed we see a still stranger process of disintegration at work. Here also the first symptoms are subliminal idées fixes, translating themselves into somatic symptoms, whose origin is only recovered by help of the profounder memory of hypnotic trance. But with Fräulein Anna these submerged ideas, these hidden ulcers of the mind, become, so to say, confluent. We have a transition from idées fixes to a secondary personality, dominated by those ideas, and sinking into incoherent insanity. Yet even from that depth a certain resolute firmness of the patient's temper, aided by Dr. Breuer's skill in suggestion, raises her once more, and replaces her uninjured among sane and vigorous women.