Customer Reviews

Studies On Hysteria (Basic Books Classics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A fascinating book that explores the hidden factors behind anxiety, written when Freud was still studying his first hysterical patients that became famous in the psychoanalytic literature. The collaboration with Breur was actually sealed with this book, but ironically it was also the end of their friendship. Apart from the psychoanalytic concepts, the reader can really enjoy the five case studies included in "Study on hysteria". Only one case study was written by Breur and this goes to show that Freud really wanted to go deep into the unconscious whereas Breur after the first patient didn't go any further; basically because he would have had to confront himself with the patient's sexual drives as well as his instincts. This is a very stimulating book that allows the reader to appreciate the kind of female patients affected by hysteria before the 20th century, that were not understood by most psychiatrists. Freud menaged to understand why the repression of the sexual instinct led to a neurosis.

I'm not disputing the first reviewer who gave the book one star because it is a poor translation. Strachey's translation is good enough, though, to make the book readable, and it should be read by everyone. Freud's clarity of thought and insight and pure intelligence is well represented in this book, and it serves as a decent introduction to elementary psychoanalysis.

Josef Breuer (1842-1925) was an Austrian physician whose works laid the foundation of psychoanalysis. This collaborative effort was Freud's first book. Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"(E)ach individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words."
"(One patient) aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a 'talking cure,' while she referred to it jokingly as 'chimney-sweeping.'"
"As regards the symptoms disappearing after being 'talked away,' I cannot use this as evidence; it may very well be explained by suggestion."
"This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city."
"Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages."
"We describe as conscious those ideas which we observe as active in us, or which we should observe if we attended to them... and if others, apart from those, should be current at the time, we should have to call them unconscious ideas."
"(T)he great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marrage bed."
"(B)y means of my psychical work I had to overcome a psychical force in the patients which was opposed to the pathogenic ideas becoming conscious (being remembered)."

Not only did the book get to me really fast, it was in great condition.

There is a version available at Amazon translated by Nicola Luckhurst. It is excellent, although almost any version would be preferable to Strachey's mechanistic translations of Freud's work.

STUDIES IN HYSTERIA is a seminal study for both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It was written by Freud and Breuer. A long-standing but unfounded lie first told by Freud and passed on by Ernest Jones blames Breuer for abandoning "Anna O"--Bertha Pappenheim, the first analytic patient--because he couldn't handle her falling for him, but in truth he treated her long after the supposed cure he reports here. A case could be made for Breuer and Pappenheim being the actual originators of psychotherapy as a modern healing method.