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Hysteria, an ancient malady, drew Freud’s interest early on in his career and served as the site for many of his most important discoveries—among them the causative role of sexual trauma, the importance of fantasy, repression, resistance, and, as he wrote to his colleague and intimate friend Wilhelm Fliess, “the reproduction of scenes.” In this image, set in a Cartesian axis using two colors, black and red, and sent to Fliess on May 25, 1897, Freud schematically describes how hysterical symptoms are manifested and worked through in the analytic setting. The traumatic scenes at the root of hysteria (labelled I, II, etc.) are, he explains, “arranged in order of increasing resistance.” The work of analysis is to bring these repressed scences to consciousness in a process of repeatedly looping down to them, deeper down each time—a dynamic, iterative process succinctly captured in this image.
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