Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/134

120 case or in the recent case with me. The patients also gradually learned to see that in such transferences to the person of the physician they generally dealt with a force or a deception which disappeared when the analysis was accomplished. I believe, however, that if I should have delayed in making clear to them the nature of the obstacle, I would have given them a new, though a milder, hysterical symptom for another spontaneously developed.

I now believe that I have sufficiently indicated how such analyses should be executed, and the experiences connected with them. They perhaps make some things appear more complicated than they are, for many things really result by themselves during such work. I have not enumerated the difficulties of the work in order to give the impression that in view of such requirements it pays for the physician and patient to undertake a cathartic analysis only in the rarest cases. I allow my medical activities to be inflected by the contrary suppositions.—To be sure I am unable to formulate the most definite indications for the application of the here discussed therapeutic method without entering into the valuation of the more significant and more comprehensive theme of the therapy of the neuroses in general. I have often compared the cathartic psychotherapy to surgical measures, and designated my cures as psychotherapeutic operations; the analogies follow the opening of a pus pocket, the curetting of a carious location, etc. Such an analogy finds its justification, not so much in the removal of the morbid as in the production of better curative conditions for the issue of the process.

When I promised my patients help and relief through the cathartic method, I was often obliged to hear the following objections: "You say, yourself, that my suffering has probably to do with my own relation and destinies. You cannot change any of that. In what manner, then, can you help me?" To this I could always answer: "I do not doubt at all that it would be easier for destiny than for me to remove your sufferings, but you will be convinced that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness, against which you will be better able to defend yourself with a restored nervous system."