ABSTRACT
My interest in the “Talking Cure” began several years before entering Guy’s hospital as a medical student in the early 1960s. Before I was 16, I had read Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and some of his Studies on Hysteria and was fascinated by his accounts of traumatised patients who had paralysed limbs or areas of numbness for which there was no neurological explanation, but I still questioned whether or not these were true observations. Freud originally described these patients as having “no knowledge of their own anatomy”.
