with treatment by suggestion; the therapeutic praise won by this case shamed and humiliated me. When, a year later, at the beginning of my hypnotic course, the good old lady returned, this time with the pain in her back, I was already sunk in hopeless cynicism; I saw written on her forehead that she had just read the notice of the re-opening of my clinic in the newspaper, that vexatious romanticism had provided her with a convenient pain in the back so that she might have a pretext for seeing me, and again let herself be cured in the same theatrical fashion. This proved true in every particular.
As you will understand, a man possessed of scientific conscience cannot endure such cases without embarrassment. There ripened the resolve in me to renounce suggestion altogether rather than to allow myself passively to be transformed into a miracle-worker. I wanted to understand what really went on in the souls of people. It suddenly seemed to me incredibly childish to think of dispelling an illness with charms, and that this should be the only result of our scientific endeavours for a psychotherapy. Thus for me the discovery of Breuer and Freud was a veritable deliverance. I took up their method with unalloyed enthusiasm and soon recognised how right Freud was, when at a very early date, indeed so far back as the Studien ueber Hysterie, he began to direct a searchlight upon the accompanying circumstances of the so-called trauma. I too soon discovered that certainly some traumata with an obvious etiological tinge are opportunely present. But the greater number appeared highly improbable. So many of them seemed so insignificant, even so normal, that at most one could regard them as just providing the opportunity for the neurosis to appear. But what especially spurred my criticism was the fact that so many traumata were simply inventions of phantasy which had never really existed. This perception was enough to make me sceptical about the whole trauma-theory. (But I have dealt with these matters in detail in my lectures on the theory of psychoanalysis).[1] I could no longer suppose that
- ↑ "Psychoanalysis." Nervous and Mental Disease, No. 19. Monograph series.
