why the Gauls another. The further we get away, in analytical investigations from the epoch of the manifest neurosis, the less can we expect to find the real motive of the neurosis, since the dynamic disproportions grow fainter and fainter the further we go back into the past. In constructing our theory so as to deduce the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost obeying the impulse of our patients to withdraw themselves as far as possible from the critical present. The pathogenic conflict exists only in the present moment. It is just as if a nation wanted to regard its miserable political conditions at the actual moment as due to the past; as if the Germany of the 19th century had attributed its political dismemberment and incapacity to its suppression by the Romans, instead of having sought the actual sources of her difficulties in the present. Only in the actual present are the effective causes, and only here are the possibilities of removing them.
The Etiological Significance of the Actual Present
A greater part of the psychoanalytic school is under the spell of the conception that the conflicts of childhood are conditio sine qua non for the neuroses. It is not only the theorist, who studies the psychology of childhood from scientific interest, but the practical man also, who believes that he has to turn the history of infancy inside out to find there the dynamic source of the actual neurosis—it were a fruitless enterprise if done under this presumption. In the meantime, the most important factor escapes the analyst, namely, the conflict and the claims of the present time. In the case before us, we should not understand any of the motives which produced the hysterical attacks if we looked for them in earliest childhood. It is the form alone which those reminiscences determine to a large extent, but the dynamic originates from the present time. The insight into the actual meaning of these motives is real understanding.
We can now understand why that moment was pathogenic, as well as why it chose those particular symbols. Through the conception of regression, the theory is freed from the narrow formula of the importance of the events in childhood, and the actual conflict thus gets that significance which, from an empirical standpoint, belongs to it implicitly. Freud himself introduced
