ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's work with Matilda Breuer was not yet psychoanalysis. Although the technique of psychotherapy that Freud evolved during the 1890s was in many respects that of psychoanalysis, the theory that he used to explain his clinical observations was decidedly pre-psychoanalytic. This chapter discusses the beginnings of psychoanalytic technique in the free-association method and Freud's first distinctively psychoanalytic model of the architecture of the soul. Freud's movement away from hypnotic suggestion therapy seems to have begun in 1891. Freud seems to have initiated this "pressure method" during the treatment of Elisabeth von R in late 1892, although he did not completely abandon the therapeutic use of hypnosis until early 1895. Freud's next step was the creation of the method of "free association", which he came to call the "fundamental rule of psychoanalysis". Freud's use of the free-association method was rooted in a long-standing philosophical belief in what he called "psychical determinism".
