Psychoanalysis

In 1885, Freud was given the opportunity to study at the Salpêtrière in Paris under the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot had specialised in the field of hysterical paralysis and established hypnosis as a research tool, the experimental application of which actually made it possible to eliminate symptoms of this kind. Paralysed people could suddenly walk again, and blind ones could see. Although this 'messianic' effect is not known to last long, as Freud soon realized through his own experiments, the phenomenon of hypnotic false-healing played a decisive role in reinforcing his idea of a purely psychological background to the complex neurotic clinical picture.

A few years later (1887–88), he worked as a neurologist in a hospital (the Public Institute for Children's Diseases in Vienna), where some little patients suffered from neurotic symptoms. All attempts to develop a suitable neuronal treatment failed; in fact, the detailed examinations did not reveal any organic defects. In the monograph written on this cases, Freud documented his differential-diagnostically supported suspicion that neurotic symptoms probably would have psychological causes.

Finishing the ineffective hypnosis, the idea of psychoanalysis began to receive serious attention; Freud initially called it ''free association''. His first attempt to explain neurotical symptoms on this path was presented in ''Studies on Hysteria'' (1895). Co-authored with Josef Breuer, this is generally seen as the birth of psychoanalysis. The work based on their partly joint treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, referred to by the pseudonym "Anna O." Bertha herself had dubbed the treatment ''talking cure''. Breuer, a distinguished physician, was astonished but remained unspecific; while Freud formulated his hypothesis that Anna's hystera seemed to be caused by distressing but unconscious experiences related to sexuality, basing his assumption on corresponding free associations made by the young women. For example, she sometimes liked to jokingly rename her talking cure as ''chimney sweeping'', an association about the fairy tale through which part of a pregnant woman's house 'the stork' gives birth to the baby – or in Lacan's words: "The more Anna provided signifers, the more she chattered on, the better it went." See also ''Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious'' (1905).

Around the same time, Freud had started to develop a neurological hypothesis about mental phenomena such as memory, but soon abandoned this attempt and left it unpublished. Insights into neuronal-biochemical processes that store experiences in the brain – like engraving the proverbial tabula rasa with some code – belongs to the physiological branch of science and lead in a different direction of research than the psychological question of what the differences between consciousness and unconsciousness are. After some thought about a suitable term, Freud called his new instrument and field of research ''psychoanalysis'', introduced in his essay “Inheritance and Etiology of Neuroses”, written in 1896. Provided by Wikipedia