Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [109]
Impressed by Charcot’s views, Freud at first treated his own hysterical patients as if the neurosis were indeed a neurological disorder. For the most part he used “electrotherapy,” a method in vogue at the time; he applied electrodes to the affected part of the body and delivered a mild electric current that produced a tingling or muscular twitch. He had some initial success with the method, but his familiarity with hypnosis led him to suspect that the benefits were due less to the electric current than to suggestion—his assurance to the patient that the treatment would dispel the symptom.
With this in mind, he began the more direct use of hypnotic suggestion, although this was disapproved of in Viennese medical circles and considered close to quackery. Freud knew that members of the “Nancy School” in France, followers of the medical hypnotist Auguste Liébeault, of whom we heard earlier, were treating hysteria by post-hypnotic suggestion. They would hypnotize their patients and tell them that the symptom would disappear when they awoke from the trance. Freud adopted the technique and was delighted by the results. In December 1887 he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin ear, nose, and throat specialist he had met that year and with whom he had struck up a close friendship, “During the last few weeks I have plunged into hypnotism, and have had all sorts of small but peculiar successes.”13
But all too soon he found to his sorrow that the relief was usually partial and temporary, so he took a different tack, using hypnosis as Breuer had with Bertha Pappenheim. For several years Freud hypnotized hysterics and asked them to recall and talk about the “traumatic event” that first brought about a particular symptom. He had fairly good results with some, but, disappointingly, either the improvement was temporary or the banished symptom was replaced by a different one. Moreover, the technique was inapplicable to the many patients who could not be hypnotized.
Despite these limitations, in the course of half a dozen years Breuer and he discussed a series of cases—Bertha Pappenheim and Freud’s more recent patients—and gradually worked out a theory of hysteria that, unlike Charcot’s, was wholly psychological. They concluded that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences”—memories of emotionally painful experiences—that have somehow been excluded from consciousness. As long as such memories remain forgotten, the emotion associated with them is “strangulated” or bottled up and converted into physical energy, taking the form of a physical symptom. When the memory is recovered through hypnosis, the emotion can be felt and expressed, and the symptom disappears.
This was the gist of a brief paper that Breuer and Freud published in 189314 and of a lengthy, detailed work published in 1895, Studies on Hysteria, which reported on Breuer’s one case and four of Freud’s, presented their theory of hysteria, and discussed the relief of symptoms by hypnotic catharsis—and by a better method Freud had discovered that abandoned hypnosis altogether and brought about not temporary relief but actual cure.
The Invention of Psychoanalysis
No historical or sociological account of scientific progress can adequately explain the sudden appearance of psychoanalysis and its discoveries of unconscious psychological processes. In the latter part of the nineteenth century many men reared in Vienna or other leading European cities were trained