Traumata

…analysts often seek magically to explain his specific acts by tracing them to particular infantile traumata. Rather than trying to understand the patient as a whole, they concentrate on why he made a specific slip of the tongue or dreamed an individual dream. In the first place, no one denies that infantile traumata and fixations may sometimes be at the root of adult neuroses; the question is: Is this always so?

But the traumata merely act then as exciting causes.

As exciting causes, psychic traumata, exposure to cold, the puerperium, excesses, have been brought forward.

Like the words ‘trauma’ and ‘traumata’, the word ‘stigmata’ seems to exercise its functions unacknowledged in writings about hysteria and allied conditions…