Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic method have now been in existence for over a century. In recognition of the centenary of the publication of Freud's and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria, perhaps the first truly psychoanalytic work, it seems fitting to offer a brief retrospective on the origins of the psychoanalytic method.

By 1892, historian Peter Gay has noted, “Freud had assembled the outlines of psychoanalytic technique: close observation, apt interpretation, free association … and working through” (1988, p. 73). The psychoanalytic method thus began with Freud's treatment of Emmy von N., Fraulein Elisabeth von R., and Miss Lucy R., the neurotic patients whose case histories became immortalized in the Studies on Hysteria. Freud's approach to the treatment of his hysterical patients was originally hypnoanalytic,