Sometimes one succeeded in directly stimulating the self-treatment of the patient in the dream. I recollect a neurotic who suffered from a severe disturbance of speech and also of walking, the result of a spastic paralysis of the legs and muscles of the mouth in consequence of a strong repression of rage. The discharge which took place under hypnosis was so dangerous to those in the vicinity that I had prematurely to break off the treatment. However, before waking the patient I told him to discharge the unreleased part in his dream. I let him sleep alone with an orderly. In the middle of the night he sprang up and again lived through an experience of anxiety and rage accompanied with shouting and raving, and although previously paralysed he ran down the whole length of the staircase of the hospital.
An especially frequent symptom in the war neuroses—the convulsive attacks—directly represents, in my opinion, an auto-hypnotic state appearing in the form of an attack.
Being buried (as the result of an explosion) with its total obliteration of the conscious ego, naturally the most frequent originator of the war neuroses, acts most often as the first cause. The loss of consciousness during the convulsive attack and the subsequent amnesia is that beneficent not-knowing into which the neurotic person flies before the memory of that all too horrible situation, or before the knowledge of some act of his own which he may have to perform as a result of his affective damming-up, but which nevertheless brings him into grave danger. I have already in my earlier work alluded to the fact that the physical form of expression of the convulsion varies according to its unconscious symbolic meaning. The most frequent form of the convulsion simply represents a repetition of those defence movements which the patient made when he was threatened with being shattered when he was buried. The convulsive attacks always take place when the ideas regarding those events are subconscious, and the strongly repressed affects which are bound to them, are associatively stimulated. A door slammed, a thunder-clap, a distant shot, makes the patient break down, and his previously unconscious anxiety idea becomes over-weighted. Terror and dread of death here generally form the primary basis for the dissociation of the psyche and for the attack-like mastery of the conscious by the unconscious.