DISCOVERY 



231 



Psycho- Analysis 



By William Brown, M.A., M.D. (Oxon), 

 D.Sc. (Lond.) 



Reader in Psychology in lite University of London (King's College) 



The psycho-analytic movement dates roughly from 

 1893, when Breuer and Freud published their joint 

 contribution on " The Psychical Mechanism of Hys- 

 teria " in the Neiirologisches Centralblatt. In this and 

 in their articles appearing two years later, under the 

 heading " Studies in Hysteria," are summed up the 

 doctrine of psycho-catharsis' for which Breuer was 

 mainly responsible. 



Charcot, Janet, and other members of the French 

 School had regarded hysteria as a form of mental 

 dissociation, but had been unable to explain it further. 



Breuer and Freud discovered that hysterical 

 symptoms sometimes disappeared when certain early 

 emotionallj'-tinged memories were called up to the 

 surface of the mind by means of hypnosis. An im- 

 portant factor in the cure seemed to be that these 

 memories had to be lived over again in all their original 

 emotional intensity. 



The method was called the Cathartic Method, because 

 it consisted essentially in purifying the mind by 

 affording to the subject an outlet for his bottled-up 

 emotion. In short, as Freud says, " The hysteric 

 suffers from memories," painful memories of an 

 emotional nature, which had not been adequately 

 worked out at the time of their original occurrence. 

 If these memories are again brought to the surface and 

 worked off by what is called " abreaction," the hys- 

 terical symptoms disappear. Two types of hysteria 

 were distinguished with reference to the cathartic 

 process : 



1. Retention hysteria, which we have briefly described. 



2. Defence hysteria, where the earlier memories that 

 are responsible for the symptoms seem to have been 

 kept out of consciousness by some sort of active mental 

 force. " a defence mechanism." 



Freud discovered in several of his patients that 

 strong urging was needed to bring the memories to the 

 surface ; and, arguing from this observed fact of mental 

 resistance in the patients, he deduced the existence 

 of a state of repression of the memories. With this 

 conception of repression a change came over the theory, 

 because it involved the assumption of definite groups 

 of subconscious (or, better, unconscious) mental pro- 

 cesses of a particular nature, and it is with this concep- 

 tion of repressed unconscious ideas that Freud breaks 



■ Literally " purifying the mind." 



away from Breuer and develops his own general theory 

 of the Unconscious. 



Freud very soon came to the conclusion that the 

 experiences undergoing repression were sexual in 

 nature ; indeed, that they were invariably so. In 

 this view, also, Breuer was unable to follow him. 



At first Freud held that the repressed memories were 

 memories of real sexual occurrences in the early life of 

 the patient. Later on, he discovered that many of 

 these so-called sexual traumata were imaginations on 

 the part of the patient. He therefore had to change 

 his theory to harmonise with this, and so developed 

 his characteristic sexual theory, according to which 

 neurotic sj'mptoms are due, not so much to buried 

 memories of a sexual nature as to disturbances in the 

 process of psycho-sexual development in the child's 

 life, including the childish phantasies concerned with 

 the sexual problem. 



Freud found that he himself was not very successful 

 at hypnosis (only succeeding in about 30 per cent, of 

 his attempts), so he cast about for some other means, 

 and he found that, if he simply urged his patients in 

 the waking state to remember what they could, the 

 memories gradually came back ; especially if he 

 let them speak at random, as things came into their 

 minds, significant memories appeared from time to 

 time. 



This is the method of psjxho-analysis (the over- 

 coming of resistance by free association). 



The method of psycho-analysis is, then, the method 

 devised to overcome resistance to the re-entering into 

 consciousness of these repressed memories. (Hypnosis, 

 in doing so, is said to increase the resistance in other 

 directions.) Freud regarded his method as one of 

 evading rather than overcoming resistance. His first 

 view, as we have seen, was that these memories were 

 of a sexual nature, and corresponded to memories of 

 actual sexual occurrences in the patient's early life. 

 Later on he was obliged to revise that view, because 

 he found the memories were often not those of actual 

 occurrences, but of fancies, etc. 



Gradually he came to hold a theory in which the 

 sexual instinct is considered to be one of early origin 

 and subject to possibilities of abnormal development. 



There is a form of infantile sexuality consisting of 

 sexual processes concerned with the feeling of pleasure 

 produced by sucking, pleasure in connection with the 

 excretions, as well as pleasure arising from the infliction 

 of pain and the suffering of pain, pleasure in exhibition, 

 etc. 



Such tendencies as these sometimes appear un- 

 changed, or even exaggerated, in adults, and are 

 known to medical science as perversions. These 

 partial processes undergo certain degrees of repression 

 or transformation, especially between the ages of 



