Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
One can readily imagine how complicated such a work may become. By
constantly overcoming the resistance, one pushes his way into the inner
strata, gaining knowledge concerning the accumulative themes and passing
threads found in this layer; one examines as far as he can advance with
the means at hand, and by means of the pressure procedure he gains first
information concerning the content of the next strata.
The threads are dropped, taken up again, and followed up until they
reach the juncture; they are always retrieved, and by following a memory
fascicle one reaches some by-way which finally opens again. In this
manner it is possible to leave the work, layer by layer, and advance
directly on the main road to the nucleus of the pathogenic organization.
Thus the fight is won but not finished. One has to follow up the other
threads and exhaust the material; but now the patient helps again
energetically, for his resistance has mostly been broken.
In these later stages of the work it is of advantage if one can surmise
the connection and tell it to the patient before it has been revealed.
If the conjecture is correct the course of the analysis is accelerated,
but even an incorrect hypothesis helps, for it urges the patient to
participate and elicits from him energetic refutation, thus revealing
that he surely knows better.
One, thereby, becomes astonishingly convinced, _that it is not possible
to press upon the patient things which he apparently does not know, or
to influence the results of the analysis by exciting his expectations_.
I have not succeeded a single time in altering or falsifying the
reproductions of memory or the connections of events by my predictions;
had I succeeded it surely would have been revealed in the end by a
contradiction in the construction. If anything occurred as I predicted,
the correctness of my conjecture was always attested by numerous
trustworthy reminiscences. Hence, one must not fear to express his
opinion to the patient concerning the connections which are to follow;
it does no harm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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