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In a panel on the topic, Wellsprings of Psychoanalysis, we are well advised to distinguish between the wellsprings for which the historical evidence is speculative or presumptive and those for which the evidence is authenticated. Hypnosis is one of the roots that lies in the latter category; it is authenticated and well documented. As a result of the recently completed Standard Edition, it is now possible to begin with Volume I and trace Freud's beginnings in private practice with hypnosis, his attempts to perfect himself in its techniques and conceptualizations, and his abandonment of it in favor of his newly invented psychoanalysis. This was followed after two and three decades by his later reflections, acknowledgments, and perspectives on hypnotism in its various aspects.
Thus he wrote in 1923, 'It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psycho-analysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.' Thanks to the work of Liébeault, Bernheim, Heidenhain, and Forel, 'the genuineness of these phenomena was recognized'. Two important lessons could be drawn from hypnotism. Freud continued: 'First, one was given convincing proof that striking somatic changes could after all be brought about solely by mental influences, which in this case one had oneself set in motion. Secondly, one received the clearest impression—especially from the behaviour of the subjects after hypnosis—of the existence of mental processes that one could only describe as "unconscious". The "unconscious" had, it is true, long been under discussion among philosophers as a theoretical concept; but now for the