CHAPTER 11
Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors
“But Doctor, I’m not asleep, you know; I can’t be hypnotized.” Those words, half apologetic yet half taunting, rang in the ears of a young Viennese physician one afternoon in 1892. The doctor felt sure he could cure this patient of her troublesome symptoms if only he could hypnotize her. And yet, in spite of his repeated assertions—“You are feeling drowsy; your eyelids are heavier and heavier; soon you will be fast asleep!”—the patient remained disconcertingly awake.1
The patient suffered from hysteria, a condition that irritated or baffled most other doctors at that time because its symptoms had no apparent physical basis. Most doctors minimized the condition’s importance, sometimes even dismissing hysterical patients as idlers or fakers, trying to avoid their responsibilities through imaginary illnesses. This doctor knew otherwise, however, because he had studied in France with Charcot, who taught that the symptoms were real and worthy of serious attention; and with Bernheim, who’d had some success in treating hysteria by hypnotizing patients and then simply and directly suggesting that the symptoms disappear (see Chapter 10).
Now, in his own practice, the young doctor confirmed the partial success of direct hypnosis but also learned about an even more effective technique that used hypnosis indirectly. A major problem, however, was that too many patients like the one above remained unresponsive to hypnotic induction. The search for a different method, applicable to almost everyone, became an essential step in the development of the world-altering theory that would become known as psychoanalysis.