Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
One has to guard here in general against two things. If the patient is
checked in the reproduction of the inflowing ideas, something is apt to
be “buried” which must be uncovered later with great effort. On the
other hand one must not overestimate his “unconscious intelligence,” and
one must not allow it to direct the whole work. If I should wish to
schematize the mode of labor, I could perhaps say that one should
himself undertake the opening of the inner strata and the advancement in
the radial direction, while the patient should take care of the
peripheral extension.
The advancement is brought about by the fact that the resistance is
overcome in the manner indicated above. As a rule, however, one must at
first solve another problem. One must obtain a piece of a logical thread
by which direction alone one can hope to penetrate into the interior.
One should not expect that the voluntary information of the patient, the
material which is mostly in the superficial strata, will make it easy
for the analyzer to recognize the locations where it enters into the
deep, and to which points the desired connections of thought are
attached. On the contrary, just this is cautiously concealed, the
assertion of the patient sounds perfect and fixed in itself. One is at
first confronted, as it were, by a wall which shuts off every view, and
gives no suggestion of anything hidden behind it.
If, however, one views with a critical eye the assertion obtained from
the patient without much effort and resistance, one will unmistakably
discover in it gaps and injuries. Here the connection is manifestly
interrupted and is scantily completed by the patient by an expression
conveying quite insufficient information. Here one strikes against a
motive which in a normal person would be designated as flimsy. The
patient refuses to recognize these gaps when his attention is called to
them. The physician, however, does well to seek under these weak points
access to the material of the deeper layers and to hope to discover just
here the threads of the connections which he traces by the pressure
procedure. One, therefore, tells the patient, “You are mistaken, what
you assert can have nothing to do with the thing in question; here we
will have to strike against something which will occur to you under the
pressure of my hand.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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