You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis originated, as all students know, in the treatment of hysterical patients by catharsis. Hysteria had previously been considered due to some sort of constitutional deficiency. Breuer and Freud maintained that certain events had occurred in the life of the hysteric, which later turned out to have had a traumatic significance. The patients in their state of hysteria could not recall these events, but if induced by hypnosis or other means to remember, the patient did recall the event and then abreacted the repressed emotions. This sequence was most clearly evident in the case of Anna O., who discovered the cathartic method practically by herself; i.e. she, on her own initiative, “talked out” the events that gave rise to her hysterical symptoms. Anna O. manifested literally no resistance, and it is doubtful if any patient since that time has been as cooperative in giving forth the historical information relevant to his neurosis.
When Freud began to treat hysterical patients he followed Breuer's lead and searched actively for traumatic incidents; however, the harder he searched the more reluctant the patients became. (Today we can realize that the patients were responding to the pressure of Freud's questioning as well as to the content of his queries.) This reluctance was later given the name of “resistance” and Freud soon recognized that dealing with resistances constituted the heart of treatment. The psychoanalyst today does not take issue with the patient's reluctance to give significant data, but rather interprets this resistance and relates it to comparable repressions in the transference and other life history material.