Concept
Hypnoid state
Josef Breuer’s term for a dreamlike, self-induced hypnotic state of consciousness, arising in reverie or under strong affect, in which the capacity for association is restricted. Ideas that arise in such a state stay cut off from the rest of consciousness and can become pathogenic; Breuer made these states the ground and condition of hysteria, while Freud came to treat them as secondary to defence.
Read more- Introduced by
- Josef Breuer
- Key works
- 3
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introduced by
- Josef Breuer 1893 The thesis that hypnoid states are the basis and condition of hysteria first appeared in the Preliminary Communication (1893); in his theoretical chapter of Studies on Hysteria Breuer defends the term “hypnoid” as naming the inner likeness of states akin to self-hypnosis.
derives from
- Dissociation 1893 The hypnoid state was put forward to account for the splitting of consciousness that French psychiatry had described as double conscience. The Preliminary Communication holds that this split exists in rudiment in every hysteria, says the authors here agree with Binet and the two Janets, and groups the tendency to dissociation with the abnormal states it calls hypnoid. Breuer's theoretical chapter values hypnoid states above all for their power to bring about the splitting of the psyche.
diverged into
- Defense 1895 Freud sets his defence hysteria, in which a psychical force keeps the idea from the ego, against Breuer’s hypnoid hysteria, in which the idea is left outside the ego by the state in which it arose and meets no resistance; he suspects that defence is the more basic of the two.