Psychotherapeutic Aims

Abstract

PRIOR TO 1900, before he had begun to evolve the libido theory, Freud held that neurosis (hysteria) had its origin in a traumatic experience during childhood; specifically, in an experience of sexual seduction by an adult or by an older child [18]. This hypothesis had evolved out of his work with Breuer in seeking to use catharsis as a cure for hysterical symptoms. Catharsis consisted of evoking, under hypnosis, the memory of a traumatic event which bore a causal relationship to the symptom, though memory of the event had been lost to consciousness. Some of the traumas thus remembered seemed to Freud, after a time, both ineffective for and inappropriate to the production of the specific symptom in question. Such memories he termed “screen-memories” [30] and regarded them as merely representative of memories of genuinely traumatic events that had occurred at an earlier period in the patient’s life. In the pursuit of the recollection of earlier and genuinely traumatic events, he was led into the realm of memories of childhood experience, and specifically of childhood sexual experience.