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Quote :Studies on Hysteria
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. […] Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.
This is a real Eureka moment. Here Freud and Breuer are at the threshold of devising what their patient Anna O. called "the talking cure." (Anna O.'s name for psychoanalysis stuck, and with good reason. It's catchy, right?)
They're discovering—for the first time, and to their "great surprise"—the power of recollection to heal past traumas.
The doctors do stress, though, that recollection alone is not enough. If a patient gives a cold and clinical account of what happened to her, she's unlikely to be healed; she has to re-experience the trauma again, within the safety of the analytic setting, in order for the analysis to really work. Sounds scary, but kind of nice, we guess.
And we know: it's crazy to think that anyone would "suffer from […] reminiscences." To our ears, it may sound like Freud and Breuer are saying that hysterics' panic attacks, paralyses, tics, twitches, and terrible phobias are all in their heads. And in a sense, this is precisely what the doctors are saying.
But that doesn't mean they're dismissing hysterical symptoms as unreal. Not at all. That hysterics "suffer mainly from reminiscences" is, from the doctors' point of view, good news. It means that these women can be cured by talking.
We wish all of our problems could be cured by talking. And chocolate.
Anyway, this moment in Freud's early writings is key because it marks the beginning of psychoanalysis. Freud would refine his techniques throughout the rest of his career, and he would broadly expand the theory underpinning his techniques.
But the set-up and key players of psychoanalytic treatment were already in place. No matter what else would change, there would always be an analyst who listened and a patient who spoke, reliving the past in order to be relieved of it.
Pretty poetic, if we do say so ourselves.