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In our ‘Preliminary Communication’ we reported how, in the course of our investigation into the aetiology of hysterical symptoms, we also came upon a therapeutic method which seemed to us of practical importance. 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’. (P. 6.)
We further endeavoured to explain the way in which our psychotherapeutic method works. ‘It brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the first instance, by allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech; and it subjects it to associative correction by introducing it into normal consciousness (under light hypnosis) or by removing it through the physician's suggestion, as is done in somnambulism accompanied by amnesia.’ (P. 17.)
I will now try to give a connected account of how far this method carries us, of the respects in which it achieves more than other methods, of the technique by which it works and of the difficulties it meets with. Much of the substance of this is already contained in the case histories printed in the earlier portion of this book, and I shall not be able to avoid repeating myself in the account which follows.
For my own part, I too may say that I can still hold by what is contained in the ‘Preliminary Communication’. None the less I must confess that during the years which have since passed—in which I have been unceasingly concerned with the problems touched upon in it—fresh points of view have forced themselves on my mind. These have led to what is in part at least