The Talking Cure and the Analyst's Intentions

Talking cures as we practice them today started with Breuer and Freud's attempts to make sense of patients' symptoms by listening to what they said or were asked to say about their symptoms and themselves. It was an extraordinary medical innovation, for until that point only resting cures, physical procedures, and hypnosis had been used to alleviate the incomprehensible suffering of mental patients. Freud had learned to hypnotize in France. Breuer and he had started to use hypnosis in order to relieve their patients' symptoms. They came upon something that change their medical practice:

For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result. The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance. (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895, p. 6)

This quotation marks the birth of psychoanalysis and all talking cures derived from it. To recover from our psychic disturbances, we must find words to affectively express the personal experiences that make us ill. Breuer and Freud had tapped into the therapeutic power of the spoken word, the word spoken to and with the physician.

Breuer and Freud's technique was marked by the psychiatry of the period in which they practiced. Their focus was on removing