ABSTRACT
It is a well-known fact that psychoanalysts shirk using the concept of cure in their written work. To identify and credit the psychiatric patient with unhappiness and suffering at the end of the nineteenth century was a revolutionary step in the process of cure. Up till then, the psychiatric patient had been treated either as a bizarre object of social ridicule or as a nuisance to be manhandled by medical procedures into apathetic compliance. The picture of that tradition has been most vividly portrayed by Foucault. It is very hard to imagine what things were like when Freud appeared on the psychiatric scene with the intense reticence of true vision. Freud had advised that persons with strong narcissistic bias of personality are not suitable for analytic work and cure; and psychoses, in his judgement, constituted the extreme of those who were beyond our means of theory and practice.
