ABSTRACT
By the time Breuer’s detailed account of Anna O’s talking cure treatment was published, Freud had begun to forge a different theory of hysteria. Breuer attributed its symptoms to their traumatic cause occurring when the patient was in a daydreaming or hypnoid state of mind. Freud argued that patients were unconscious of the cause of their symptoms of hysteria because they had repressed this cause through ‘an act of will’. Indicative, in Freud’s view, of patients repressing the cause of their ills was their resistance to being hypnotized. Faced with this resistance, he was heartened by learning from a French doctor, Hippolyte Bernheim, that people can recall in full consciousness what occurs to them when they have been hypnotized provided they are sufficiently pressed to do so. Conflict about love or sex, as Freud put it, was the cause of another of his patient’s hysterical ills.
