Freud's Theories of the Neuroses

🔖 This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI HYSTERIA Freud's Position in the Study of Hysteria. Repression and Conversion. Sexuality and Infantilism. The Hysterical Mind. The Hysterical Symptom: its Somatic and Psychic Foundations. The Hysterical Phantasies. The Hysterical Attack. Nervous Disturbances. Neurotic Anxiety (Anxiety-Dream, AnxietyHysteria, Phobia). Concerning the Psychoses. Since the "Studien iiber Hysterie" which Freud published in collaboration with Breuer in 1895, the essential features of which were re-, viewed in the general theory of the neuroses, he has not made a systematized presentation of the insight and progress since gained in the subject; hence this chapter can afford no systematic and well-rounded picture but only a cursory view. The psychogenic nature of hysteria which had figured as a disease of the nerves until the time of Charcot is already generally recognized from the works of Janet, Breuer and Freud. Although the French school, with P. Janet at its head, had already accepted the conception of the dissociation of mind and of the unconscious in hysteria, still the view of Janet that the cause of the establishment of this mental dissociation was an inborn weakness of the mental synthesis was an unsatisfactory one. The Breuer-Freudian view put this dissociation and the unconscious in their correct mutual relationship by introducing a dynamic conception: the mental life is represented as a play of impelling and inhibiting forces and if, in one case, a group of ideas remain in the unconscious, an active conflict with other groups of ideas has caused the isolation and the unconsciousness of the first group. Thus, the peculiarity of the Freudian conception lies in the "repression." The analysis proves that such repressions play an...