- sires, phantasies and illusions can grow luxuriantly, and this we
have to regard as the critical causation. Through such phantasies people slip into an unreal attitude, preeminently ill-adapted to the world, which is bound some day to lead to a catastrophe. When we trace back the infantile phantasy of the patient to her earliest childhood we find, it is true, many distinct, outstanding scenes which might well serve to provide fresh food for this or that variation in phantasy, but it would be vain to search for the so-called traumatic motive, whence something abnormal might have sprung, such an abnormal activity, let us say, as day-dreaming itself. There are certainly to be found traumatic scenes, although not in earliest childhood; the few scenes of earliest childhood which were remembered seem not to be traumatic, being rather accidental events, which passed by without leaving any effect on her phantasy worth mentioning. The earliest phantasies arose out of all sorts of vague and only partly understood impressions received from her parents. Many peculiar feelings centered around her father, vacillating between anxiety, horror, aversion, disgust, love and enthusiasm. The case was like so many other cases of hysteria, where no traumatic etiology can be found, but which grows from the roots of a peculiar and premature activity of phantasy which maintains permanently the character of infantilism.
You will object that in this case the scene with the shying horses represents the trauma. It is clearly the model of that night-scene which happened nineteen years later, where the patient was incapable of avoiding the trotting horses. That she wanted to plunge into the river has an analogy in the model scene, where the horses and carriage fell into the river.
Since the latter traumatic moment she suffered from hysterical fits. As I tried to show you, we do not find any trace of this apparent etiology developed in the course of her phantasy life. It seems as if the danger of losing her life, that first time, when the horses shied, passed without leaving any emotional trace. None of the events that occurred in the following years showed any trace of that fright. In parenthesis let me add, that perhaps it never happened at all. It may have even been a mere phantasy, for I have only the assertions of the patient. All of a sudden, some eighteen years later, this event becomes of importance and
