On the Discovery of the Cathartic Method1

The controversy about the discovery of the cathartic method is well known. Was it by Janet or Breuer? The latter employed the method from 1880 to 1882, but published his results, jointly with Freud, only in 1893. The former expounded the method in L'Automatisme psychologique, which appeared in 1889 (7). We have no intention of renewing this debate, but only of making a modest and purely historical contribution. At the first International Congress of Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism (5), held in the Hôtel Dieu, Paris, from 8 to 12 August, 1889, two French doctors, Bourru and Burot, working independently of the two great masters referred to above, presented a paper describing a technique very like the cathartic method. This paper, entitled Un Cas de neurasthénie hystérique avec double personnalité(3), concerned a woman patient, Mme de M., who was treated about 1887, and who presented a complex of hysterical symptoms rather like those of Breuer's patient Frl. Anna O.—paralyses, contractures, disturbances of vision, recurrent somnambulism, etc.

The patient had been ill for ten years. Two years previously, she had had a temporary remission following upon a 'fortunate event'. She had then relapsed, and no treatment had had any success. In March 1887, Mme de M. asked to be treated by hypnosis, of which she had heard. This was when she wrote in her diary the interesting sentence, 'Hypnosis will bring back what has occurred as a result of a chance event.' In the first hypnotic session, a hallucinatory state was produced in which this episode in her life was re-lived, and this was accompanied by convulsive shaking of her limbs. A distinct improvement appeared in Mme de M's condition.

Unfortunately hypnotic treatment could not be continued and the patient relapsed. When she returned to resume treatment a year later, the writers limited themselves to giving the ordinary kind of suggestions for suppressing the symptoms, while being at the same time concerned to