Studies on Hysteria

Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie, 1895), co-authored by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, is the foundational clinical document of psychoanalysis and one of the principal ancestors of the depth-psychological tradition. The book collects the case of Anna O. (Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim) and four case histories by Freud — Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, and Elisabeth von R. — together with Freud’s theoretical chapter and Breuer’s “Theoretical Considerations.”

The clinical thesis — that the hysterical symptom is the substitute formation for a repressed affective memory that has not been discharged, and that bringing the memory to consciousness under the right affective conditions resolves the symptom — is the precipitate from which all later talking-cure technique descends. For the Seba lineage the work matters as the original formulation of what Jung would later generalize into the complex theory: affectively charged mnemonic clusters organize psychic life below consciousness. Jung’s own word-association experiments at the Burghölzli were the empirical confirmation of the Studies’ central claim. See sigmund-freud.

Relationships

• sigmund-freud
• complex
• word-association-experiments