A Short Account of Psychoanalysis - Freud, Sigmund

A SHORT ACCOUNT OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS By Sigmund Freud I Psycho-analysis grew up in a narrowly-restricted field. At the outset, it had only a single aim - that of understanding something of the nature of what were known as the ’functionalę nervous diseases, with a view to overcoming the impotence which had so far characterized their medical treatment. The neurologists of that period had been brought up to have a high respect for chemico-physical and pathologicoanatomical facts; and they were latterly under the influence of the findings of Hitzig and Fritsch, of Ferrier, Goltz and others, who seemed to have established an intimate and possibly exclusive connection between certain functions and particular parts of the brain. They did not know what to make of the psychical factor and could not understand it. They left it to the philosophers, the mystics and - the quacks; and they considered it unscientific to have anything to do with it. Accordingly they could find no approach to the secrets of the neuroses, and in particular of the enigmatic ’hysteriaę, which was, indeed, the prototype of the whole species. As late as in 1885, when I was studying at the Salpetric I found that people were content to account for re, hysterical paralyses by a formula which asserted that they were founded on slight functional disturbances of the same parts of the brain which, when they were severely damaged, led to the corresponding organic paralyses. Of course this lack of understanding affected the treatment of these pathological conditions badly as well. In general this consisted in measures designed to ’hardenę the patient - in the prescription of medicines and in attempts, mostly very ill-contrived and executed in an unfriendly manner, at bringing mental influences to bear on him by threats, jeers and warnings and by exhorting him to make up his mind to ’pull himself togetherę. Electrical treatment was given out as being a specific cure for nervous conditions; but anyone who has