Concept
Cathartic method
The treatment of hysteria that Josef Breuer developed with Anna O. in 1880–82, and that he and Freud set out in the Studies on Hysteria. Under hypnosis the patient is led back to the forgotten event in which a symptom arose. The symptom disappears once that memory is recovered with its affect and the affect is discharged in words, a process they called abreaction. Because many patients could not be hypnotised, Freud replaced hypnosis first with concentration and the pressure of his hand, and then with free association, from which psychoanalysis grew.
Development
1893
introduced by Josef Breuer
Breuer devised the method while treating Anna O. in 1880–82. The 'Preliminary Communication' of 1893, which he wrote with Freud and which opens the Studies, reports that symptoms vanished for good once the precipitating memory was awakened with its affect and put into words. Freud calls it Breuer's method of cure by inquiry and abreaction under hypnosis.
In Studies on Hysteria (1895)
Relations
- 1893 introduced by Josef Breuer
Breuer devised the method while treating Anna O. in 1880–82. The 'Preliminary Communication' of 1893, which he wrote with Freud and which opens the Studies, reports that symptoms vanished for good once the precipitating memory was awakened with its affect and put into words. Freud calls it Breuer's method of cure by inquiry and abreaction under hypnosis.
- 1914 diverged into Working through
Freud presents working through as analysis's counterpart to the abreaction of the cathartic method. Theoretically it does the same job, discharging the affect held back by repression. But it does so through slow work against resistance under the fundamental rule, not through a single hypnotic discharge, and this is what sets analysis apart from suggestion.
- diverged into Free association
Free association grew out of Breuer's cathartic method and departed from it. Finding that many patients could not be hypnotised, Freud set out to reach the pathogenic memories without hypnosis, then gave up other means of suggestion too, and let patients associate freely.
Works
- 1895
- 1924
The Development of Psychoanalysis
Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (1924; in English, The Development of Psychoanalysis, 1925) is a short programmatic book by Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, issued as the first number of Freud's series Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse. According to its preface, it grew out of conversations in the summer of 1922: Ferenczi drafted the critical part and Rank the positive section on the analytic situation. The two revised the whole together after Freud, at the Berlin congress of September 1922, set a prize question on how analytic technique and theory had influenced each other. They adapted the text to that question but withdrew from the competition. The book argues that psychoanalysis had grown from a therapeutic procedure into a vast body of theory while its technique lagged behind, leaving many analysts disoriented and too closely bound to Freud's few technical papers. Starting from Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914) and the repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the authors give repetition, rather than remembering, the leading role in treatment: the decisive unconscious material was never conscious, so it can only be reproduced in the relation to the analyst, where it must be understood and turned into present memory. Rank's section describes analysis as a time-limited process of libidinal flow, set going and carried by transference. The analyst stays largely passive and intervenes, like a catalyst, where resistance marks a neurotic deviation. Ego resistances give way to a transference in which the clinical neurosis is converted into a transference neurosis that revives the Oedipal "primal neurosis". Frustration keeps affects from discharging prematurely and drives the libido back to its points of fixation. A final phase of "weaning" dissolves the transference, and for it the analyst sets a fixed end date. Abreaction remains the healing agent, but its affects now run their course in the relation to the analyst rather than being tied to recovered memories. Ferenczi's historical-critical section reviews techniques that had stalled at earlier stages of psychoanalytic knowledge: collecting associations, dictionary-like translation of symbols, symptom analysis, "complex analysis", mechanically uncovering the stages of libido theory, speculative, phylogenetic and anagogic interpretation, lecturing patients, calling every stall a resistance, and both rigid passivity and "wild activity". It names the analyst's own narcissism as a source of error, and holds that the unconscious proper, never experienced, can only be relived piecemeal in the present, as a "fractionated catharsis". A chapter on theory and practice distinguishes intellectual knowledge from conviction gained through experience, and presents Freud's work as a "circulus benignus" in which each corrects the other. The authors see psychoanalysis moving from a phase of knowledge (Erkenntnisphase) to a phase of experience (Erlebnisphase). They conclude that a training analysis should not differ from a therapeutic one, that the patient's excess of knowledge should give way to the analyst's greater knowledge, and that technique will grow simpler, perhaps even readmitting hypnosis and suggestion, while psychoanalytic knowledge becomes common to all physicians and to therapists who are not physicians. Published in the same year as Rank's The Trauma of Birth, the book became a point of contention within Freud's inner circle.
See also
People
References
- The Development of Psychoanalysis1924Evidence for a relation
- Studies on Hysteria1895Evidence for a relation
- Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through1914Evidence for a relation