Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/196

182 You have now gained the impression that the sphere of application of the analytic psychotherapy is a very limited one, for you really heard me enumerate nothing but contraindications. Nevertheless, there remain sufficient cases and morbid states, such as all chronic forms of hysteria with remnant manifestations, the extensive realm of compulsive states, abulias, etc., on which this therapy can be tried.

It is pleasing that particularly the worthiest and highest developed persons can thus be most helped. Where the analytic psychotherapy has accomplished but little one can cheerfully assert that any other treatment would have certainly resulted in nothing.

(e) You will surely wish to ask me about the possibility of doing harm through the application of psychoanalysis. To this I will reply that if you will judge justly you will meet this procedure with the same critical good- feeling as you have met our other therapeutic methods, and doing this you will have to agree with me that a rationally executed analytic treatment entails no dangers for the patient. One who, like a layman, is accustomed to ascribe to the treatment everything occurring during the disease, will probably judge differently. It is really not so long since our hydrotherapeutic asylums met with similar opposition. Thus one who was advised to go to such an asylum became thoughtful because he had an acquaintance who entered the asylum as nervous and there became insane. As you surmise we deal with cases of initial general paresis who in the first stages could still be sent to hydrotherapeutic asylums, and who there merged into the irresistible course leading to manifest insanity. For the layman the water was the cause and author of this sad transformation. Where it is a question of unfamiliar influences, even doctors are not free from such mistaken judgment. I recall having once attempted to treat a woman by psychotherapy who passed a great part of her existence by alternating between mania and melancholia. I began to treat her at the end of a melancholia and everything seemed to go well for two weeks, but in the third week she was again merging into a mania. It was surely a spontaneous alteration of the morbid picture, for two weeks is no time in which anything can be accomplished by psychotherapy, but the prominent—now deceased—physician who saw the case