Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/99

Rh in the preliminary states of the neurosis to be cured, and that they then attach themselves to every medical activity which intensively concerns itself with the patient, and produce in him a psychic change. I could see no harm or danger in the application of hypnosis even in these cases where it was used excessively. The causes for the harm produced lay elsewhere and deeper. When I review the therapeutic efforts of those years since the communications of my honored teacher and friend, J. Breuer, gave me the cathartic method, I believe that I have more often produced good than harm, and brought about some things which could not have been produced by any other therapeutic means. On the whole it was, as expressed in the "Preliminary Communication," "a distinct therapeutic gain."

I must mention still another gain in the application of this method. No severe case of complicated neurosis, with either an excessive or slight tinge of hysteria can better be explained than by subjecting it to an analysis by Breuer's method. In making this analysis I find that whatever shows the hysterical mechanism disappears first, while the rest of the manifestations I meanwhile learn to interpret and refer to their etiology. I thereby gained the essential factors indicated by the instrument of the therapy of the neurosis in question. When I think of the usual differences between my opinion of a case of neurosis before and after such an analysis, I am almost tempted to maintain that the analysis is indispensable for the knowledge of a neurotic disease. I have furthermore made it a practice of applying the cathartic psycho-therapy in conjunction with a rest cure, which when required is changed to a full Weir-Mitchell treatment. This advantage lies in the fact that, on the one side I avoid the very disturbing intrusion of new psychic impressions produced during psycho-therapy; on the other hand, I exclude the monotony of the Weir-Mitchell treatment, during which the patient not seldom merges into harmful reveries. One might expect that the very considerable psychic labor often imposed upon the patient during the cathartic cure, and the excitement resulting from the reproduction of traumatic events, would run counter to the sense of the Weir-Mitchell rest cure, and would prevent the successes which one is wont to obtain from it. But the contrary happens; through the combination of the Breuer and the Weir-Mitchell therapy, we