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.
Development
1893
Josef Breuer introduced by
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.
1905
Sigmund Freud critiqued by
Freud distanced himself from the hypnoid state in stages. In 1895 he reports never having met a genuine hypnoid hysteria, since every case he took up turned into defence hysteria. In the Dora case (1905) he says he has given up only the stress on the hypnoid state, credits the idea wholly to Breuer, and calls the term superfluous and misleading. In 1909 he tells his Clark University audience that the notion proved obstructive and had been dropped.
Relations
- 1893 introduced by Josef Breuer
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.
- 1893 derives from Dissociation
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.
- 1895 diverged into Defense
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.
- 1905 critiqued by Sigmund Freud
Freud distanced himself from the hypnoid state in stages. In 1895 he reports never having met a genuine hypnoid hysteria, since every case he took up turned into defence hysteria. In the Dora case (1905) he says he has given up only the stress on the hypnoid state, credits the idea wholly to Breuer, and calls the term superfluous and misleading. In 1909 he tells his Clark University audience that the notion proved obstructive and had been dropped.
Works
- 1895
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1910
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Über Psychoanalyse) is the text of the five lectures Freud gave in German in September 1909 at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were published in 1910 by Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna and dedicated to the university's president, G. Stanley Hall. Addressed to an audience of scholars and laypeople, they give a compact account of how psychoanalysis came about and what it had found by then. The first lecture credits the method's origin to Josef Breuer's treatment of a young hysterical woman in 1880–82. Under hypnosis she recalled the scenes in which her symptoms had arisen, and expressing the affect held back at the time made them disappear: the "talking cure". Freud sums up that hysterics suffer from reminiscences, and explains bodily symptoms as the conversion of strangled affect. The second lecture tells how Freud gave up hypnosis and found that forgotten memories are held back by a force felt in treatment as resistance. This is the same force that once pushed them out of consciousness: the repression of a wish incompatible with the person's ethical and aesthetic standards. The symptom is a distorted substitute for what was repressed. The third lecture describes free association under the fundamental rule, the "complex" of the Zurich school, dream interpretation as the royal road to the unconscious, and the meaning of slips and other parapraxes. The fourth argues that analysis regularly leads to the patient's sexual life and back to childhood. It sets out infantile sexuality (erogenous zones, autoerotism, component drives, object choice) and the nuclear complex of love for one parent and rivalry with the other. The fifth explains falling ill as a flight from frustrating reality into substitute satisfaction, by way of regression and phantasy, and contrasts neurosis with art. It presents transference as the strongest evidence for the theory and answers the fear that making the repressed conscious is dangerous. In analysis, conscious judgment replaces repression, energy is freed for sublimation, and some impulses are granted direct satisfaction. Freud closes by warning against the harm of excessive sexual repression in civilisation, with the tale of the Schilda townsfolk who starved their horse by cutting its oats.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Studies on Hysteria1895 Evidence for a relation
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905 Evidence for a relation
- Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1910 Evidence for a relation