The Listening Cure: Listening for Culture in Intercultural Psychological Treatments

Psychoanalysis, and the many forms of psychotherapy it has spawned, have come to be known as “talking cures.” While this term retains a popular currency, it was created in the early 1880s, many years before Freud elaborated his psychoanalytic method. As Freud's mentor and collaborator Josef Breuer (Breuer, 1895) reported in his seminal case study of the patient “Anna O,” it was Anna who coined the term. According to Breuer, Anna suffered from a host of debilitating hysterical symptoms, including paralyses, deafness, visual defects, loss of speech, and hallucinations. These symptoms proved impervious to Breuer's interventions until Anna noticed that when she “gave utterance” (Breuer, 1895, p. 29) to her symptoms in the presence of her doctor, they vanished. As Anna—who was quick to grasp the effectiveness of this new therapeutic technique—deliberately repeated this procedure, her symptoms disappeared. Although the talking cure is commonly attributed to Freud, it was Anna who not only gave it its name, but who was its “real discoverer” (Jones, 1961, p. 147). Indeed, during the period when Anna and Breuer were developing the talking cure, Freud, under the influence of French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot, was treating hysterics with hypnosis. He did not hear of this case, or of the method it employed, until after Anna's treatment had ended, and he did not implement his own version of the talking cure until 1889, seven years after its discovery (Jones, 1961).

Intrigued by the psychological benefits of verbalization, and disenchanted with hypnosis, Freud began to work closely with