The German Genius

Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months and began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842–1925). Breuer, also Jewish, had made two major discoveries, on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuer’s importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.
    For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), described for casebook purposes as “Anna O.” She had a variety of symptoms, including hallucinations, speech disturbances, a phantom pregnancy, and intermittent paralyses. In the course of her illness(es) she experienced two different states of consciousness and extended bouts of somnambulism. Breuer found that in this latter state she would, with encouragement, describe certain events, following which her symptoms improved temporarily. However, her condition deteriorated badly after her father died—there were more severe hallucinations and anxiety states. Again, however, Breuer found that “Anna” could obtain relief from these symptoms if he could persuade her to talk about her hallucinations during her autohypnoses. This was a process she herself called her “talking cure” or “chimney sweeping” ( Kaminfegen ). Breuer’s next advance was made accidentally: “Anna” started to talk about the onset of a particular symptom (difficulty in swallowing), after which the symptom disappeared. Building on this, Breuer eventually discovered that if he could persuade his patient to recall in reverse chronological order each occurrence of a specific symptom, until she reached the first occasion, most of them disappeared in the same way. By June 1882, Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, “totally cured.” 30
    The case of Anna O. impressed Freud. For a time he himself tried electrotherapy, massage, hydrotherapy, and hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with “free association”—a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. This technique led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud concluded that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born his concept of the unconscious and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realized that many of these early memories that were revealed—with difficulty—under free association, were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the “recalled” events had in fact never taken place, he refined his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words, the sexual traumas and aberrations reported by patients showed what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirmed that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character. 31
    A later development occurred with the death of Freud’s father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognized in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that he had hitherto repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” Freud’s central idea in The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like “a sentry asleep at its post.” 32 The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself.
    Freud has recently come under sustained criticism and revision and is now much discredited. 33 At the time he lived, however, in the late nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the