文档介绍：1
STUDIES ON HYSTERIA
(1893-1895)
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
In 1893 we published a ‘munication’¹ on a new method of examining
and treating hysterical phenomena. To this we added as concisely as possible the
theoretical conclusions at which we had arrived. We are here reprinting this ‘Preliminary
Communication’ to serve as the thesis which it is our purpose to illustrate and prove.
We have appended to it a series of case histories, the selection of which could not
unfortunately be determined on purely scientific grounds. Our experience is derived from
private practice in an educated and literate social class, and the subject matter with which
we deal often touches upon our patients’ most intimate lives and histories. It would be a
grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of the patients
being recognized and their acquaintances ing informed of facts which were
confided only to the physician. It has therefore been impossible for us to make use of
some of the most instructive and convincing of our observations. This of course applies
especially to all those cases in which sexual and marital relations play an important
aetiological part. Thus es about that we are only able to produce very plete
evidence in favour of our view that sexuality seems to play a principal part in the
pathogenesis of hysteria as a source of psychical traumas and as a motive for ‘defence’-
that is, for repressing ideas from consciousness. It is precisely observations of a markedly
sexual nature that we have been obliged to leave unpublished.
The case histories are followed by a number of theoretical reflections, and in a final
chapter on therapeutics the technique of the ‘cathartic method’ is propounded, just as it
has grown up under the hands of the neurologist.
If at some points divergent and indeed contradictory opinio