Luckhurst Nicola - Studies in Hysteria

PENGUIN CLASSICS

STUDIES IN HYSTERIA

SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitlers invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Josef Breuer, an older colleague) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freuds life was uneventful, but his ideas shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

NICOLA LUCKHURST is Lecturer in Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford. Her publications include The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, Science and Structure in Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu and Stphane Mallarm Correspondence.

RACHEL BOWLBYS books include Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997), Shopping with Freud (1993) and Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992). She is professor of English at the University of York.

ADAM PHILLIPS was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of Several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwins Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdinis Box.

SIGMUND FREUD

AND JOSEF BREUER

Studies in Hysteria

Translated by

NICOLA LUCKHURST

With an Introduction by

RACHEL BOWLBY

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ber den psychischen Mechanisms hysterischer Phnomene (Vorlufige Mitteilung)

first published in 1893 in Neurologisches Zentralblatt 12 (1) and (2)

Studien ber Hysterie first published 1895 (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke)

Hysterische Phantasien und ihre Beziehung zur Bisexualitt first published

1908 in Zeitschrift fr Sexualwissenschaft (1)

This translation first published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2004

This translation published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2004

7 9 10 8 6

Sigmund Freuds German texts collected in Gesammelte Werke (194052)

copyright Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., London, 1952

Translation and editorial matter copyright Nicola Luckhurst, 2004

Introduction copyright Rachel Bowlby, 2004

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Freud, Sigmund, 18561939.

[Studien ber Hysteria. English]

Studies in hysteria / Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer; translated by

Nicola Luckhurst; with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby.

p. cm.

Breuers name appears first on earlier editions.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-64481-2

1. Hysteria. 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Breuer, Josef, 18421925.

II. Luckhurst, Nicola III. Title.

RC532.F73813 2004

616.8524dc22 2004044287

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe New Caledonia

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Near the start of the Studies in Hysteria, Breuer and Freud describe what they have newly understood to be the sequence by which hysterical symptoms are cured:

The psychical process that had originally taken place has to be repeated in as vivid a way as possible, brought to its status nascendi, and then talked through. This makes any phenomena involving stimuli cramps, neuralgias, hallucinations appear once more at full intensity and then vanish [schwinden] forever. (p. )

The order outlined here involves a return to a point of origination; a repetition or re-reaction; and a final ending. Past, present and future interfere with one another and reconnect; a painful return of or to a past, resurrected and relived, makes possible a future forever free of the symptom. Hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences (p. ), in Breuer and Freuds resonant phrase; for their suffering to be relieved, the sore past must be allowed to emerge into the present, its pressure relieved.

What happens in this is dramatic. A performer makes a final appearance, a reprise for one last time, charged with the built-up emotion (at full intensity) of the finale. A rebirth (going back to the status nascendi) is followed by sudden death. This is a twofold drama, made up of the patients retrospective telling or reliving, now, during the therapeutic conversation, and the recovered history, now seen by the patient for what it was: for its subsequent significance. This recalls, or anticipates, what was to be the future role in psychoanalysis of an actual play: Sophocles Oedipus Rex. Oedipus story gives Freud the model of (male) childhood development in the structure of the Oedipus complex, but this is not all that the play suggests. Its action, as Freud points out in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), consists of nothing other than dialogues that ultimately rewrite Oedipus history by showing it up in a completely different light: the combination of present conversation coupled with a reinterpretation of the past is exactly what happens in psychoanalysis.

The theatrical language of Breuer and Freuds exposition points to both a connection with and a departure from the treatment of hysteria at the time. In the mid-1880s, Freud had spent six months in Paris following the work of Charcot, the renowned psychiatrist who gave public presentations of hysterical patients at the Salptrire hospital. The patients were exhibited before an audience; their illness was seen in the form of a repeatable performance, in the four characteristic phases of a hysterical attack. Charcot used hypnosis to induce hysterical acts and attacks as a means of demonstrating their typical features. The effect was also to suggest that the illness, if it could be stimulated artificially in this way, was not primarily organic or hereditary. Breuer and Freud followed him in this theoretical postulate, but their treatment took a different course. The stress fell on the auditory not the visual; not on the patient as a bodily spectacle for assembled observers, but on her words to a single trusted interlocutor. Here the rehearsal of the symptoms is not didactic (for an audience) but therapeutic (for the patient). The theatre, as in the first quotation, is no longer a real one, in which symptoms are made to appear, but an analogical one in which they spontaneously perform for one last time.