| {'text': 'STUDIES ON HYSTERIA (1893-1895) PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION In 1893 we published a Preliminary Communication! on a new method of examining and treating hysterical phenomena. To this we added as concisely as possible the theoretical conclusions at which we had arrived.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'Quite frequently it is some event in childhood that sets up a more or less severe symptom which persists during the years that follow. The connection is often so clear that it is quite evident how it was that the precipitating event produced this particular phenomenon rather than any other.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'We are here reprinting this Preliminary Communication to serve as the thesis which it is our purpose to illustrate and prove. We have appended to it a series of case histories, the selection of which could not unfortunately be determined on purely scientific grounds.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'In that case the symptom has quite obviously been determined by the precipitating cause. We may take as a very commonplace instance a painful emotion arising during a meal but suppressed at the time, and the producing nausea and vomiting which persists for months in the form of hysterical vomiting.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'Our experience is derived from private practice in an educated and literate social class, and the subject matter with which we deal often touches upon our patients most intimate lives and histories.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'A girl, watching beside a sick-bed in a torment of anxiety, fell into a twilight state and had a terrifying hallucination, while her right arm, which was hanging over the back of the chair, went to sleep;', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'It would be a grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of the patients being recognized and their acquaintances becoming informed of facts which were confided only to the physician.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'from this there developed a paresis of the same arm accompanied by contracture and anaesthesia. She tried to pray but could find no words; a length she succeeded in repeating a childrens prayer in English.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'It has therefore been impossible for us to make use of some of the most instructive and convincing of our observations. This of course applies especially to all those cases in which sexual and marital relations play an important aetiological part.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'When subsequently a severe and highly complicated hysteria developed, she could only speak, write and understand English, while her native language remained unintelligible to her for eighteen months. -', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'Thus it comes about that we are only able to produce very incomplete evidence in favour of our view that sexuality seems to play a principal part in the pathogenesis of hysteria as a source of psychical traumas and as a motive for defence that is, for repressing ideas from consciousness.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'The mother of a very sick child, which had at last fallen asleep, concentrated her whole will-power on keeping still so as not to waken it. Precisely on account of her intention she made a clacking noise with her tongue.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'It is precisely observations of a markedly sexual nature that we have been obliged to leave unpublished.', 'label': {}} {'text': '(An instance of hysterical counter-will.)', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'The case histories are followed by a number of theoretical reflections, and in a final chapter on therapeutics the technique of the cathartic method is propounded, just as it has grown up under the hands of the neurologist.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'This noise was repeated on a subsequent occasion on which she wished to keep perfectly still; and from it there developed a tic which, in the form of a clacking with the tongue, occurred over a period of many years whenever she felt excited.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'If at some points divergent and indeed contradictory opinions are expressed, this is not to be regarded as evidence of any fluctuation in our views.', 'label': {}} {'text': '- A highly intelligent man was present while his brother had an ankylosed hipjoint extended under an anaesthetic. At the instant at which the joint gave way with a crack, he felt a violent pain in his own hip-joint, which persisted for nearly a year.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'It arises from the natural and justifiable differences between the opinions of two observers who are agreed upon the facts and their basic reading of them, but who are not invariably at one in their interpretations and conjectures.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'Further instances could be quoted. In other cases the connection is not so simple. It consists only in what might be called a symbolic relation between the precipitating cause and the pathological phenomenon - a relation such as healthy people form in dreams.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'J. BREUER, S. FREUD April 1895 On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1893, Nos. and 2. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION', 'label': {}} {'text': 'For instance, a neuralgia may follow upon mental pain or vomiting upon a feeling of moral disgust. We have studied patients who used to make the most copious use of this sort of symbolization.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'The interest which, to an ever-increasing degree, is being directed to psycho-analysis seems now to be extending to these Studies on Hysteria. The publisher desires to bring out a new edition of the book, which is at present out of print.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'In still other cases it is not possible to understand at first sight how they can be determined in the manner we have suggested. It is precisely the typical hysterical symptoms which fall into this class,', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'It appears now in a reprint, without any alterations, though the opinions and methods which were put forward in the first edition have since undergone far-reaching and profound developments.', 'label': {}} {'text': 'such as hemi-anaesthesia, contraction of the field of vision, epileptiform convulsions, and so on. An explanation of our views on this group must be reserved for a fuller discussion of the subject.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'Observations such as these seem to us to establish an analogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of the traumatic neuroses, and to justify an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'In traumatic neuroses the operative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affect of fright - the psychical trauma.', 'label': {}} | |
| {'text': 'In an analogous manner, our investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas.', 'label': {}} | |