Sigmund Freud skriver oppildnet til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess om hvordan han ser for seg at hysteri har sin årsak i fortrengte scener, muligens fremkalt av masturbasjon

Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess i Berlin: (*OBS! Må oversettes*):

«Dear Wilhelm,

In the interim received postcard and telegram and regret that the congress did not bring you what it brought meópleasure and renewal. Since then I have been in a continual euphoria and have been working like a young man. As you will gather from the enclosure [Draft L], my acquisitions are becoming consolidated. In the first place, I have gained a sure inkling of the structure of hysteria. Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes. Some can be obtained directly, others by way of fantasies set up in front of them. The fantasies stem from things that have been heard but understood subsequently, and all their material is of course genuine. They are protective structures, sublimations of the facts, embellishments of them, and at the same time serve for self-relief. Their accidental origin is perhaps from masturbation fantasies.

A second important piece of insight tells me that the psychic structures which, in hysteria, are affected by repression are not in reality memories -- since no one indulges in memory activity without a motive -- but impulses that derive from primal scenes (Masson, 1985, pp. 238-239