When we discussed the conditions which, according to our experience, are decisive in the development of hysterical phenomena from psychic traumas, we were forced to speak of abnormal states of consciousness in which such pathogenic presentations originate, and we had to emphasize the fact that the recollection of the effective psychic trauma is not to be found in the normal memory of the patient but in the hypnotized memory. The more we occupied ourselves with these phenomena the more certain became our convictions that the splitting of consciousness, so striking in the familiar classical cases of double consciousness, exists rudimentarily in every hysteria, and that the tendency to this dissociation, and with it the tendency towards the appearance of abnormal states of consciousness which we comprehend as "hypnoid states," is the chief phenomenon of this neurosis.
In this view we agree with Binet and with both the Janets about whose most remarkable findings in anesthetics we have had no experience.
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