Studies on Hysteria
Where the talking cure gets its name. Anna O., Emmy von N., and the first account of symptom as meaning.
Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.
Studies on Hysteria collects five case histories and two theoretical chapters in which Breuer and Freud set out the cathartic method: symptoms lift when the patient recovers the memory that produced them and discharges the affect still attached to it. The German text opens with Breuer's treatment of Anna O., then follows Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R., each written as narrative rather than nosological entry.
The clinical interest lies in watching technique change under the authors' hands. Breuer works through hypnosis; Freud, finding many patients unhypnotisable, presses on the forehead and asks what comes, edging toward free association and the resistances that organise his later method. The theoretical chapter treats conversion, the splitting of consciousness, and the difference between a memory abreacted and one that festers.
First published in German in 1895; the Strachey translation appeared in English in 1955.
About the authors
Josef Breuer
Josef Breuer was a Viennese physician and physiologist whose treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., between 1880 and 1882 gave psychotherapy its first cathartic method. He observed that her symptoms eased when she recalled and spoke about their origins under hypnosis. He shared these findings with Sigmund Freud, and the two co-authored Studies on Hysteria in 1895. Breuer later withdrew from the partnership, unconvinced by Freud's insistence on sexuality. His physiological work addressed respiration and the vestibular system.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was an Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. Born in Freiberg, Moravia, he moved to Vienna in 1860 and worked there for most of his life, training as a physician and developing psychoanalysis as both a theory of mind and a method of treatment. His works included The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and Civilisation and its Discontents (1931). After Nazi forces took control of Austria in 1938, he emigrated to London, where he died in 1939.
Details
- 1895
- 1936
- Studien uber Hysterie
- German
- Basic Books
- Basic Books, 1895
- 336
- 9780786748648