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Glossary / History of psychiatry

Hypnosis

Leading a person by suggestion into a special, sleep-like state of consciousness. Physicians used it for treatment and research at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the early 1880s Josef Breuer put his patient under hypnosis and had her recall and describe the scenes in which her symptoms began[1].

In a lecture of 1909 Freud pointed to commands given under hypnosis that are carried out after waking, without the person knowing why. He took this as a sign that mental processes of which a person is unaware can influence ordinary behaviour[1].

Freud later went on to modify Breuer's procedure[2].

Related terms

  • Talking cureA treatment that tries to relieve symptoms by having the patient talk. The name was given in English in the early 1880s by Josef Breuer's patient known as Anna O.
  • HysteriaIn nineteenth-century medicine, the name for an illness in which symptoms such as paralysis or fits appear although no injury or lesion can be found to explain them.

Sources

  1. S. Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21, 181–218 (1910).
  2. S. Freud, “Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie,” Wiener klinische Rundschau 10(22–26); English translation in the Standard Edition, vol. 3, 191–221 (1896).