Up till now we only know that this later symptom had its prologue in childhood, but the pathological side remains obscure. To solve this enigma we require other experiences. The amnesia which I will set forth fully later on shows clearly the disproportion between the so-called shock and the part played by phantasy. In this case phantasy must predominate to an extraordinary extent to provoke such an effect. The shock in itself was too insignificant. We are at first inclined to explain this incident by the shock that took place in childhood, but it seems to me with little success. It is difficult to understand why the effect of this infantile trauma had remained latent so long, and why it only now came to the surface. The patient must surely have had opportunities enough during her lifetime of getting out of the way of a carriage going full speed. The reminiscence of the danger to her life seems to be quite insufficiently effective: the real danger in which she was at that one moment in St. Petersburg did not produce the slightest trace of neurosis, despite her being predisposed by an impressive event in her childhood. The whole of this traumatic event still lacks explanation; from the point of view of the shock-theory we are hopelessly in the dark.
You must excuse me if I return so persistently to the shock-theory. I consider this necessary, as now-a-days many people, even those who regard us seriously, still keep to this standpoint. Thus the opponents to psychoanalysis and those who never read psychoanalytic articles, or do so quite superficially, get the impression that in psychoanalysis the old shock-theory is still in force.
The question arises: what are we to understand by this predisposition, through which an insignificant event produces such a pathological effect? This is the question of chief significance. and we shall find that the same question plays an important rôle in the theory of neurosis, for we have to understand why apparently irrelevant events of the past are still producing such effects that they are able to interfere in an impish and capricious way with the normal reactions of actual life.
The Sexual Element in the Trauma
The early school of psychoanalysis, and its later disciples, did all they could to find the origin of later effects in the special kind
