Aphasia, Hysteria and the Talking Cure

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is the theory of a therapy. The therapy, in its purest and most ‘original’ form, consists of a ‘talking cure’.¹ What, we may start by asking, could comprise a therapy in the interchange of words? The cure Freud devised was more than a replacement for the unsatisfactory methods of electrotherapy and hydrotherapy, or the sanatorium cures of turn of the century novels. (Cf. Steiner, 1964.) He unseated physicalism² from its pride of place in the treatment of nervous illness and located all therapeutic power in the doctor-patient couple. In order to understand the relation between therapeutic and theoretical discourse, we must find out how it became clear to Freud that the therapeutic situation created the conditions for a cure of a major disease, and hence how Freud located all the necessary conditions for this cure in the necessary conditions of language.