Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
(_c_) You will have surmised from some of my observations that the
analytic cure contains qualities which keep it away from the ideal of a
therapy. Tuto, cito, iucunde; the investigation and examination does not
really mean rapidity of success, and the allusion to the resistance has
prepared you for the expectation of inconveniences. Certainly the
psychoanalytic method lays high claims on the patient as well as the
physician. From the first it requires the sacrifice of perfect candor,
it takes up much of his time, and is therefore also expensive; for the
physician it also means the loss of much time, and due to the technique
which he has to learn and practice, it is quite laborious. I even find
it quite justified to employ more suitable remedies as long as there is
a prospect to achieve something with them. It comes to this point only:
if we gain by the more laborious and cumbersome procedure considerably
more than by the short and easy one, the first is justified despite
everything. Just think, gentlemen, by how much the Finsen therapy of
lupus is more inconvenient and expensive than the formerly used
cauterization and scraping, and yet it means a great progress, merely
because it achieves more, it actually cures the lupus radically. I do
not really wish to carry through the comparison, but psychoanalysis can
claim for itself a similar privilege. In reality I could develop and
test my therapeutic method in grave and in the gravest of cases only; my
material at first consisted of patients who tried everything
unsuccessfully, and had spent years in asylums. I hardly gained enough
experience to be able to tell you how my therapy behaves in those
lighter, episodically appearing diseases which we see cured under the
most diverse influences, and also spontaneously. The psychoanalytic
method was created for patients who are permanently incapacitated, and
its triumph is to make a gratifying number of such, permanently
capacitated. Against this success all expense is insignificant. We can
not conceal from ourselves what we were wont to disavow to the patient,
namely, that the significance of a grave neurosis for the individual
subjected to it is not less than any cachexia or any of the generally
feared maladies.
(_d_) In view of the many practical limitations which I have encountered
in my work, I can hardly definitely enumerate the indications and
contraindications of this treatment. However, I will attempt to discuss
with you a few points:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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