Talking cure
A 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.
Breuer took the words his patient muttered in her absent states as a starting point, put her under hypnosis and had her talk. She told him the daydreams that had been occupying her and the scenes in which her symptoms began, and was calm for a while afterwards. She also jokingly called it chimney sweeping[1].
The case has long been told as the starting point of psychoanalysis. Breuer himself, however, wrote that it was a considerable time before she regained her mental balance entirely[2]. According to a later study, the illness fluctuated from 1880 to 1887, and a considerable recovery appears only by 1888[3].
Related terms
- 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.
- HypnosisLeading 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.
- PsychoanalysisThe method of treatment created by Sigmund Freud, which looks for the causes of symptoms in what the patient says, together with the theory built on it.
Sources
- S. Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21, 181–218 (1910).
- J. Breuer, S. Freud, “Studien über Hysterie,” 2nd ed., Leipzig and Vienna: F. Deuticke (1st ed. 1895) (1909).
- H. Merskey, “Anna O. Had a Severe Depressive Illness,” British Journal of Psychiatry 161(2), 185–194 (1992).