Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/194

l80 that the analytic cure contains quahties which keep it away from the ideal of a therapy. Tuto, cito, iucunde; the investigation and examination does not really mean rapidity of success, and the allusion to the resistance has prepared you for the expectation of inconveniences. Certainly the psychoanalytic method lays high claims on the patient as well as the physician. From the first it requires the sacrifice of perfect candor, it takes up much of his time, and is therefore also expensive; for the physician it also means the loss of much time, and due to the technique which he has to learn and practice, it is quite laborious. I even find it quite justified to employ more suitable remedies as long as there is a prospect to achieve something with them. It comes to this point only: if we gain by the more laborious and cumbersome procedure considerably more than by the short and easy one, the first is justified despite everything. Just think, gentlemen, by how much the Finsen therapy of lupus is more inconvenient and expensive than the formerly used cauterization and scraping, and yet it means a great progress, merely because it achieves more, it actually cures the lupus radically. I do not really wish to carry through the comparison, but psychoanalysis can claim for itself a similar privilege. In reality I could develop and test my therapeutic method in grave and in the gravest of cases only; my material at first consisted of patients who tried everything unsuccessfully, and had spent years in asylums. I hardly gained enough experience to be able to tell you how my therapy behaves in those lighter, episodically appearing diseases which we see cured under the most diverse influences, and also spontaneously. The psychoanalytic method was created for patients who are permanently incapacitated, and its triumph is to make a gratifying number of such, permanently capacitated. Against this success all expense is insignificant. We can not conceal from ourselves what we were wont to disavow to the patient, namely, that the significance of a grave neurosis for the individual subjected to it is not less than any cachexia or any of the generally feared maladies.

(d) In view of the many practical limitations which I have encountered in my work, I can hardly definitely enumerate the indications and contra-indications of this treatment. However, I will attempt to discuss with you a few points: