Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneurosesFreud, Sigmund
Science
Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Freud, Sigmund
Hysteria; Neuroses; Psychoanalysis
(_f_) In conclusion, gentlemen, I must say to myself that it will not do
to lay claim to your attention so long in favor of the analytic
psychotherapy without telling you of what this treatment consists, and
on what it is based. To be sure I can only indicate it as I have to be
brief. This therapy is founded on the understanding that unconscious
ideas—or rather the unconsciousness of certain psychic processes—are the
main causes of a morbid symptom. We share this conviction with the
French school (Janet) which moreover by gross schematization reduces the
hysterical symptom to an unconscious idée fixe. Do not fear now that we
will thus merge too far into the obscurest philosophy. Our unconscious
is not quite the same as that of the philosophers and what is more, most
philosophers wish to know nothing of the “psychical unconscious.” But if
you will put yourselves in our position, you will understand that the
interpretation of this unconscious, in patients’ psychic life, into the
conscious, must result in a correction of their deviation from the
normal, and in an abrogation of the compulsion controlling their psychic
life. For the conscious will reaches as far as the conscious psychic
processes and every psychic compulsion is substantiated by the
unconscious. You need never fear that the patient will be harmed by the
emotion produced in the entrance of his unconscious into consciousness,
for you can theoretically readily understand that the somatic and
affective activity of the emotion which became conscious can never
become as great as those of the unconscious. For we only control all our
emotions by directing upon them our highest psychic activities which are
connected with consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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