ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is a special form of psychotherapy, which itself first began to be a scientific discipline in nineteenth-century France, at which time two great schools of suggestion were developing—in Nancy with Liebeault and Bernheim and in the Salpetriere with Jean-Martin Charcot. A little later, in the works of Janet in Paris and of Breuer and Freud in Vienna, where the interpersonal relationship is visible, the first melody of psychotherapy begins to sound. What Breuer introduces is a technical modification that leads to new theories of illness and cure. The cathartic technique reveals a surprising fact, the dissociation of consciousness, which this method makes visible because it produces an amplification of consciousness. Freud's hypothesis, the theory of trauma, was by then purely psychological, and the one definitely supported by empirical facts. Ethics are integrated into the scientific theory of psychoanalysis not as a simple moral aspiration but as a necessity of its praxis.
