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PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Since psycho-analysis was not mentioned in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it is impossible to restrict this account to its advances since 1910. The more important and the more interesting portion of its history lies in the period before that date.

PREHISTORY

In the years 1880-2 a Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer (1842-1925), discovered a new procedure by means of which he relieved a girl, who was suffering from severe hysteria, of her many and various symptoms. The idea occurred to him that the symptoms were connected with impressions which she had received during a period of agitation while she was nursing her sick father. He therefore induced her, while she was in a state of hypnotic somnambulism, to search for these connections in her memory and to live through the ‘pathogenic’ scenes once again without inhibiting the affects that arose in the process. He found that when she had done this the symptom in question disappeared for good.

This was at a date before the investigations of Charcot and Pierre Janet into the origin of hysterical symptoms, and Breuer’s discovery was thus entirely uninfluenced by them. But he did not pursue the matter any further at the time, and it was not until some ten years later that he took it up again in collaboration with Sigmund Freud. In 1895 they published a book, Studies on Hysteria, in which Breuer’s discoveries were described and an attempt was made to explain them by the theory of ‘catharsis’. According to that hypothesis, hysterical symptoms originate through the energy of a mental process being withheld from conscious influence and being diverted into bodily innervation (‘conversion’). A hysterical symptom would thus be a substitute for an omitted mental act and a reminiscence of the occasion which should have given rise to that act. And, on this view, recovery would be a result of the liberation of the affect that had gone astray and of its discharge along a normal path (‘abreaction’). Cathartic treatment gave excellent therapeutic results, but it was found that they were not permanent and that they were not independent of the personal relation between the patient and the physician. Freud, who later proceeded with these investigations by himself, made an alteration in their technique, by replacing hypnosis by the method of free association. He invented the term psycho-analysis’, which in the course of time came to have two meanings: (1) a particular method of treating nervous disorders and (2) the science of unconscious mental processes, which has also been appropriately described as depth-psychology’.