ABSTRACT
It is considered that Sigmund Freud's contribution to Studies on Hysteria, a work published in collaboration with Josef Breuer, marked the birth of psychoanalysis as a method of treatment of psychic disorders, the prototype of which was hysteria. Long considered as the expression of a specifically female illness, hysterical phenomena were very widespread at the end of the nineteenth century, although it was not possible to determine whether their origin was organic or psychic. Freud noticed that the sexual factor played a decisive role when he realised that his patients – and not only his hysterical patients – frequently reported sexual traumas in their accounts of the appearance of their symptoms. The original trauma is always linked to sexual experiences that occurred in early childhood, before puberty, and which may be described as sexual abuses "in the strictest sense of the term", according to Freud.
