in a general way, were suggested by her patient. There seems to have been,
and there undoubtedly was, a sexual element entering into this last quarrel;
namely, that she was jealous of the woman who lived downstairs, though
without any proof of her husband's infidelity.

Both patient and her husband finally agreed to the physician's statement
that the symptoms were directly referable to the quarrels, although both
claimed that it had never occurred to them before, a fact made evident by
their questions and objections. No psychoanalysis was possible in this case,
for the man and woman belong to that class of people who feel that they are
cured when their symptoms are relieved. It may be argued, without any
possibility of contradiction, that a psychoanalysis would have revealed a
deeper reaching mechanism and that a closer relationship and connection
between the paralysis and other symptoms with the past sexual experiences of
the patient could have been established. This last claim may be doubted,
however, for there is always a gap between the alleged "conversion" of
mental states into physical symptoms, and this gap can in no case be bridged
over even by Freud's own accounts. The conversion always remains as a mere
statement and is a logical connection between the appearance of physical
symptoms and the so-called conflicts; in other words, it is an explanation
and not a FACT. Compared with the complex Freudian mechanism, with its
repressions, compressions, censors, dreams, etc., the conception of
hysterical symptoms as a marital weapon as comparable with the tears of more
normal women seems very simple and probably too simple. In fact, it does not
explain the hysteria, it merely gives a USE for its symptoms, and the writer
is driven back to the statement that the neuropathic person is characterized
by his or her bizarre and prolonged emotional reactions, which, in turn,
brings us back to a defect ab origine. And the Freudians, starting out to
prove that the experiences of the individual ALONE cause hysteria, by
pushing back the TIME of those experiences to INFANCY (and lately to foetal