THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis is a practice founded by Sigmund Freud. Trained as a neurologist, his inclination for research and scientific investigation was pivotal in establishing psychoanalysis as a method of clinical treatment.
A student of the neurologists Charcot and Breuer, Freud worked with the former at the Salpêtrière Hospital, where he moved away from studying the nervous system and the use of electrical treatments. He then dedicated himself to the clinical study of hysteria through hypnosis. Under Charcot, Freud learned clinical and psychopathology. Following this experience, Freud later consulted Breuer to return to the cathartic method.
Breuer, the creator of this method, also discovered that hysterical symptoms were rooted in past memories that had left a strong impression but had been forgotten. The cathartic method involved helping patients recall these experiences while in a hypnotic state (Freud, 1914/1969), allowing the re-emergence of affects that were displaced but intertwined with these memories. Under hypnosis and suggestion, patients would recount sequences of events underlying their symptoms, providing material for research.
Using Breuer’s method, Freud was able to combine investigation and treatment, since the patterns of suffering, though opaque, could be made manifest through speech, with its ambiguity
Freud himself was not particularly fond of hypnosis and suggestion. The limitations of these techniques also became evident when one of his patients asked him to remain silent—a request he honored. The importance of being able to speak one’s thoughts freely, in sequence and according to their logic, marks the beginnings of psychoanalysis as a treatment through speech, using free association. The way ideas associate in thought demonstrates the unconscious and its experience.
This clinical practice makes possible the discovery of Another Scene, one of Freud’s metaphors for the unconscious. Whether through an impossibility of symbolizing the path of certain experiences, and through the subsequent denial arising from the ego, based on its moral parameters and value judgements, the elements of desire and its satisfaction, once rejected, become detached from the association sequence. These fragments then begin to function according to a principle different from that which governs consciousness. Another scene takes shape from the mnemonic traces left by experiences of satisfaction, implicated in the symptoms and in psychic reality.
Experience with hypnosis and the cathartic method revealed the division between two distinct domains within the individual: consciousness and the unconscious. Freud’s attention to hysterical patients led him to recognize the unconscious, which manifests through its formations: a slip, a lapse, a forgetting, an error, a dream, or symptoms.
This experience drew Freud’s attention to the fact that the unconscious, in its own logic, presents itself as a text to be read and deciphered.
The functioning of the unconscious—through condensation of ideas and displacement of energy between distinct ideas— form the grammatical foundations of unconscious writing processes and of its discourse in the constitution of the social bond. Free association follows the logic of desire, which, in its movement of returning to these mnemonic traces, unveils the meaning of these memories that enclose an affect, displaced and distorted by the censoring function of the ego.
Freud, S. (1914/1969). History of the psycho-analytic movement (J. Strachey, Trans., Vol. 14). In: The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Imago.