“Breuer went on to extend this therapy. At one point in her illness, for a period of weeks, Anna O. declined to drink and would quench her thirst with fruit and melons. One evening, in a state of self-induced hypnosis, she described an occasion when she said she had been disgusted by the sight of a dog drinking out of a glass. Soon after this she asked for a drink and then woke from her hypnosis with a glass at her lips. ” (Webster, 2004) “In his published account of the case, written some twelve years later, Breuer treated the story which Anna O.
had related in a trance as a true account of an incident which had given rise to her aversion to drinking. He said he had concluded that the way to cure a particular symptom of ‘hysteria’ was to recreate the memory of the incident which had originally led to it and bring about emotional catharsis by inducing the patient to express any feeling associated with it. ” (Webster, 2004) “The sudden disappearance of one of Anna O. ’s many symptoms thus became the basis for what Breuer later described as a ‘therapeutic technical procedure’.
According to both Freud and Breuer, this method had been applied systematically to each of Anna’s symptoms and as a result she was cured completely of her hysteria. ” (Webster, 2004) “The case of Anna O. played a fundamental role in the development of Freud’s thought. She has frequently been described as the first psychoanalytic patient, a view which Freud himself, lecturing at Clark University in the United States, once endorsed: If it is a merit to have brought psychoanalysis into being, that merit is not mine. I had no share in its earliest beginnings.
I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr Josef Breuer first (in 1880-2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria. ” (Webster, 2004) “Freud, however, was understating his own role. Psychoanalysis would never have come into being if he had not transformed Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ by marrying it with Charcot’s views on traumatic hysteria and his own elaborate technique for reconstructing repressed memories through interpretation and free-association.
Works Cited
American Literature: Sigmund Freud and Hysteria. Retrieved on June 1, 2007 from http://www. geocities. com/Athens/Acropolis/6998/index. html Anzieu, D. (1986). Freud’s self-analysis. (P. Graham, Trans. ). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1975). American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th edition, text revised. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.