Repression Part I of Ii

It is understandable that Freud (1914a) referred to repression as the “cornerstone” of psychoanalysis (p. 16). For it is with his introduction of the concept of repression that Freud's theorizing becomes distinctively psychoanalytic. The concept of repression constitutes a dividing line between Freud's prepsychoanalytic and psychoanalytic writing. Prior to his introduction of repression, Freud's account of hysteria was not essentially different from Janet's (1889) and other representatives of “dynamic psychiatry” (see Ellenberger, 1970). Indeed, in the introduction to Studies on Hysteria, the editor acknowledges in a footnote Janet's priority regarding a number of concepts and formulations that Breuer and Freud employ in that work. Undoubtedly partly reflecting the influence of Breuer, terms such as “condition seconde,” “hypnoid states,” “absences,” “double conscience” (dual consciousness), and “splitting of consciousness” —all of which evoke the concept of dissociation—are used to describe and account for hysterical phenomena. For example, in their Preliminary Communications, Breuer and Freud (1893-1895) write that

the longer we have been occupied with these phenomena the more we have become convinced that the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the well-known cases under the form of “double conscience” [dual consciousness] is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteric and that a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term “hypnoid”) is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis. In these views we concur with Binet and the two Janets,

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though we have had no experience of the remarkable findings they have made on anesthetic patients, (p. 12, emphasis in original)

At other points, too, in Studies on Hysteria, Breuer and Freud indicate their general agreement with Janet. For example, Breuer writes: “In o