You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his contribution to Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud gave a very full account of the psychotherapeutic procedure which he had evolved on the basis of Breuer's discoveries. This may be described as the ‘pressure’ technique and it still included considerable elements of suggestion, though it was advancing rapidly towards what he was soon to call the ‘psycho-analytic’ method. An examination of the list of Freud's technical writings printed below (p. 172) will show that after this, apart from two very sketchy accounts dating from 1903 and 1904, he published no general description of his technique for more than fifteen years. What little we know of his methods during this period has mainly to be inferred from incidental remarks—for instance, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a)—and more particularly from what is revealed in his three major case histories of the period, ‘Dora’ (1905e [1901]), ‘Little Hans’ (1909b) and the ‘Rat Man’ (1909d). (The two last of these, incidentally, fall very near the end of this period of relative silence.) We learn from Dr. Ernest Jones (1955, 258 ff.) that already in 1908 Freud was toying with the idea of writing an Allgemeine Technik der Psychoanalyse (A General Account of Psycho-Analyti