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When Freud first renounced the use of hypnosis and substituted for it the technique of free association, he was credited with devising a remarkable new procedure, or at least, an immensely useful application of it. For a long time the origin of this method was rooted in mystery, except that it owed something to Breuer's method of catharsis in the treatment of his patient Anna O. Finally in 1920, Freud himself revealed its origin in “A Note on the Prehistory of the Technique of Analysis.” He disclosed that he had been markedly influenced by the writings of Ludwig Boerne, that his volume of these collected works was the only book surviving in his possession from adolescence, and that the technique derives from Boerne's essay on “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” Freud concluded that these recollections of his may “have brought to light the fragment of cryptomnesia which in so many cases may be suspected to lie behind apparent originality.” If anyone were to doubt that Freud had recalled this essay some 25 years after reading it, he can obtain evidence of the detail with which Freud remembered the material he had read, in Grinstein's (1968) book, “On Sigmund Freud's Dreams.”
It is well known that scientists frequently build their original work on memories of the antecedent contributions of others which are not always clearly in consciousness. Truly original ideas, entirely devoid of instigation by previous work of others, are remarkably rare and constitute milestones in the history of the development of mankind. More often a zeitgeist is built up by contributions from many sources until a new synthesis of already accumulated data results in an original conception. Thus the work of Freud, like that of other prolific contributors, can often be seen