In the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893), Breuer gave a short description of a young boy and wrote of him as follows :. . .A twelve-year-old boy, who had previously suffered from pavor nocturnus and whose father was highly neurotic, came home from school one day feeling unwell. He complained of difficulty in swallowing and headache. The family doctor assumed that the cause was a sore throat. But the condition did not improve even after several days. The boy refused food and vomited when it was pressed on him. He moved about listlessly, without energy or enjoyment; he wanted to lie in bed all the time and was very much run down physically. When I saw him five weeks later, he gave the impression of being a shy and shut-in child, and I became convinced that his condition had a psychical basis. On being questioned closely, he brought up a trivial explanationa severe reproof given by his father-which had clearly not been the real cause of his illness. Nor could anything be learnt from his school. I promised that I would extract all the information later under hypnosis. This, however, turned out to be unnecessary. In response to strong appeals from his clever and energetic mother, he burst into tears and told the following story. While on his way home from school he had gone into a urinal, and a man had held out his penis to him and asked him to take it into his mouth. He had run away in terror, and nothing else had happened to him. But he was ill from that instant. As soon as he had made his confession he recovered completely. In order to produce the anorexia, the difficulty in swallowing and vomiting, several factors were required: the boy's innate neurotic nature, his severe fright, the irruption of sexuality in its crudest form into his childish temperament and, as the specifically determining factor, the