Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [110]
Freud took his first small step toward the invention of psychoanalysis not by design but in response to a demand made by one of his patients. She was Baroness Fanny Moser, a forty-year-old widow whom he called Frau Emmy von N. in Studies on Hysteria. She sent for Freud in 1889 when she was suffering from facial tics, hallucinations of writhing snakes and dead rats, fearful dreams of vultures and fierce wild animals, frequent interruptions of her speech by a spastic clacking or popping noise that she made with her mouth, a fear of socializing, and a hatred of strangers.
Over a period of time Freud rid her of many of her symptoms by the cathartic Breuer method—she was the first patient with whom he used it—and also by the Nancy method of post-hypnotic suggestion. As he later reported in Studies:
The therapeutic success on the whole was considerable; but it was not a lasting one. The patient’s tendency to fall ill in a similar way under the impact of fresh traumas was not got rid of. Anyone who wanted to undertake the definitive cure of a case of hysteria such as this would have to enter more thoroughly into the complex of phenomena than I attempted to do.15
From Frau Emmy, however, he learned something of great importance. When he asked her to recall the traumatic episode that had initiated some symptom, she would often ramble on tediously and repetitiously without relating anything pertinent. One day Freud asked her why she had gastric pains and what they came from:
Her answer, which she gave rather grudgingly, was that she did not know. I requested her to remember by tomorrow. She then said in a definitely grumbling tone that I was not to keep on asking her where this or that came from, but to let her tell me what she had to say.16
To his credit, Freud sensed that this was an important request and let her proceed as she wished. She began talking of her husband’s death and wandered on from there, eventually speaking of the slander circulated by his relatives and by a “shady journalist” to the effect that she had poisoned him. Although this had nothing to do with her gastric pains, it revealed to Freud why she was so isolated and unsociable, and why she hated strangers; previous urging had not elicited the significant thoughts, but allowing her to ramble freely had. He realized that, wearisome as it might be, allowing the patient to say whatever came into her mind was a more effective route to hidden memories than prodding and probing; this eventually led him to the use of the technique, critically important to both therapy and research, of “free association.”
Freud recognized, too, that the technique might spare him the attempt at hypnosis with patients who could not be hypnotized. He asked them—and, after a while, all his patients—to lie down on a couch in his office, close their eyes, concentrate on remembering, and say whatever came to mind. Often they would go blank; nothing would come to mind, or what came was irrelevant, and for good reason: Freud had already noticed that forgotten memories that were retrieved only with great difficulty were those one would prefer to forget—memories involving shame, self-reproach, “psychical pain,” or actual harm. Patients who could not remember traumatic episodes were unconsciously defending themselves from pain.
Freud called this inability to retrieve painful memories “resistance” and invented a way to break through it. He first used the technique in 1892 with a young woman who could not be hypnotized and who was unable to produce useful memories. He pressed her forehead with his hand, assuring her that this would infallibly produce such memories. And it did.