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In 1910, M. O. Eder published A Case of Obsession and Hysteria Treated by the Freud Psychoanalytic Method, which was the first public clinical contribution to psychoanalysis in Great Britain. Forty-two years later Hunter and Macalpine have had the opportunity to restudy the patient.
At the age of twenty-two, the patient complained of a dull aching pain in the back of his neck, a phobia for eating among strangers, a 'bashful bladder', and sexual and social inhibitions. For three months he was treated twice weekly by a technique of word association, free association, dream analysis, and finally hypnosis. When the treatment was terminated Dr. Eder considered the patient 'cured of his difficulties'.
The study when the patient was sixty-four disclosed that the treatment had in fact neither cured him of his symptoms nor enabled him to improve his sexual functions. Nevertheless it is the authors' impression that the patient was helped to live with his symptoms, since he functioned satisfactorily for more than forty years without seeking or requiring further psychological therapy. The early report lacked any reference to transference, which was little appreciated in 1910. The authors demonstrate that the patient took flight from an unconscious incestuous heterosexual danger to an unconscious homosexual transference love for the therapist. They also speculate that countertransference prompted Dr. Eder to choose this case for his first publication.
Although the 'course of psychoanalysis' of 1910 bore little resemblance to psychoanalytic therapy of today, Dr. Eder's 'concept of the psychodynamic structure of the case, as well as his views on the prognosis, have turned out to be substantially correct'.