ABSTRACT
“WE found to our great surprise that the individual hysterical symptoms immediately disappeared, and that without return, when we had succeeded in awakening to full vividness the memory of the causative event, therewith also arousing the accompanying affect, and provided that the patient described the event in the most detailed manner possible and gave verbal expression to the affect” * With this sentence, Breuer and Freud describe in their first communication their method of treatment. In so doing, they proceeded on the assumption that the hysterical individuals suffer, in large part, from reminiscences which are pent-up in the unconscious like foreign bodies, because they are neither discharged by physical movements of expression nor in normal manner by associative elaboration. That which remains behind at that period, the analysis has to search out. It aids in this discharge, or as we say, in this “abreaction.” †
