1563

ON PSYCHOTHERAPY

Gentlemen, - Some eight years have passed since I had the opportunity, on the invitation of your much regretted chairman, Professor von Reder, of speaking here on the subject of hysteria. Shortly before that occasion I had published, in 1895, in collaboration with Dr. Josef Breuer, the Studies on Hysteria in which, on the basis of the new knowledge which we owe to his researches, an attempt was made to introduce a new method of treating the neuroses. I am glad to be able to say that the efforts we made in our Studies have met with success; the ideas expressed in them concerning the effects produced by psychical traumas owing to retention of affect, as well as the conception of hysterical symptoms as the results of an excitation transposed from the sphere of the mental to the physical - ideas for which we coined the terms abreaction’ and ‘conversion’ - are to-day generally known and understood. There is, at least in German speaking countries, no presentation of hysteria to-day that does not take them to some extent into account, and we have no colleagues who do not, for a short distance at least, follow the road pointed out by us. And yet, while they were still new, these theorems and this terminology must have sounded not a little strange.

I cannot say the same of the therapeutic procedure which was introduced to our colleagues at the same time as our theory; it is still struggling for recognition. There may be special reasons for this. At that time the technique of the method was as yet undeveloped; it was impossible for me to give medical readers of the book the directions necessary to enable them to carry through the treatment completely. But causes of a general nature have certainly also played a part. To many physicians, even to-day, psychotherapy seems to be a product of modern mysticism and, compared with our physico-chemical remedies which are applied on the basis of physiological knowledge, appears positively unscientific and unworthy of the attention of a serious investigator. Allow me, therefore, to defend the cause of psychotherapy before you, and to point out to you what may be described as unjust or mistaken in this condemnation of it.