Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
In the third place, gentlemen, I wish to refer you to the well known
experience, namely, that certain maladies and particularly the
psychoneuroses, are more accessible to psychic influences than to any
other medications. It is no modern talk but a dictum of old physicians
that these diseases are not cured by the drug, but by the doctor, to
wit, by the personality of the physician in so far as it exerts a
psychic influence. I am well aware, gentlemen, that you like very much
the idea which the aesthete Vischer, in his parody on Faust (Faust, der
Tragödie, III Teil) endowed with a classical expression: “I know that
the physical often acts on the moral.”
But would it not be more adequate and frequently more correct to
influence the moral part of the person with the moral, that is, with
psychic means?
There are many ways and means of psychotherapy. All methods are good
which produce the aim of the therapy. Our usual consolation, “You will
soon be well again,” with which we are so generous to our patients,
corresponds to one of the psychotherapeutic methods, only that on
gaining a profounder insight into the neuroses we are not forced to
limit ourselves to this consolation alone. We have developed the
technique of hypnotic suggestion, of psychotherapy through diversion,
through practice, and through the evocation of serviceable affects. I do
not disdain any of them, and would practice them all under suitable
conditions. That I have in reality restricted myself to a single
therapeutic procedure, to the method called by Breuer “cathartic,” which
I prefer to call “analytic,” is simply due to subjective motives which
guided me. Having participated in the elaboration of this therapy I feel
it a personal duty to devote myself to its investigation, and to the
final development of its technique. I maintain that the analytic method
of psychotherapy is one which acts most penetratingly, and carries
farthest; through it one can produce the most prolific changes in the
patient. If I relinquish for a moment the therapeutic point of view, I
can assert that it is the most interesting, and that it alone teaches us
something concerning the origin and the connection of the morbid
manifestations. Owing to insights which it opens for us into the
mechanism of the psychic malady, it can even lead us beyond itself, and
show us the way to still other kinds of therapeutic influences.
Allow me now to correct some errors, and furnish some explanations
concerning this cathartic or analytic method of psychotherapy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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