Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhem Fliess at han er kommet til at nøkkelen til hysteriet ligger i drømmene

Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess i Berlin (her i engelsk oversettelse, originalen er på tysk):

"I got tired yesterday, and today I cannot go on writing along the lines I intended, because the thing is growing. There is something to it. It is dawning. In the next few days there certainly will be some additions to it. I shall write you then, when it has become transparent.

I want to reveal to you only that the dream schema is capable of the most general application, that the key to hysteria as well really lies in dreams. I now also understand why in spite of all my efforts I have not yet finished the dream [book].

If I wait a little longer, I shall be able to present the psychic process in dreams in such a way that it also includes the process in the formation of hysterical symptoms. So let us wait.

Something pleasant about which I had meant to write you yesterday was sent me -- from Gibraltar by a Mr. Havelock Ellis, an author who concerns himself with the topic of sex and is obviously a highly intelligent man because his paper, which appeared in Alienist and Neurologist (October 1898) and deals with the connection between hysteria and sexual life, begins with Plato and ends with Freud; he agrees a great deal with the latter and gives Studies on Hysteria, as well as later papers, their due in a very sensible manner."

(Masson, 1985, s. 339)