Product Description

This cornerstone of modern psychoanalytic knowledge sets forth the cathartic method, in which patients' symptoms are cured as they recollect and express buried emotions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207156 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"If the Studies is not on everybody's list of Great Books, it should be." -- The New York Times

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Customer Reviews

The hidden drives beneath hysteria
A fascinating book that explores the hidden factors behind anxiety, written when Freud was still studying his first hysterical patients that became famous in the psychoanalytic literature. The collaboration with Breur was actually sealed with this book, but ironically it was also the end of their friendship. Apart from the psychoanalytic concepts, the reader can really enjoy the five case studies included in "Study on hysteria". Only one case study was written by Breur and this goes to show that Freud really wanted to go deep into the unconscious whereas Breur after the first patient didn't go any further; basically because he would have had to confront himself with the patient's sexual drives as well as his instincts. This is a very stimulating book that allows the reader to appreciate the kind of female patients affected by hysteria before the 20th century, that were not understood by most psychiatrists. Freud menaged to understand why the repression of the sexual instinct led to a neurosis.

Should be required reading in public schools
I'm not disputing the first reviewer who gave the book one star because it is a poor translation. Strachey's translation is good enough, though, to make the book readable, and it should be read by everyone. Freud's clarity of thought and insight and pure intelligence is well represented in this book, and it serves as a decent introduction to elementary psychoanalysis.

an inferior translation
There is a version available at Amazon translated by Nicola Luckhurst. It is excellent, although almost any version would be preferable to Strachey's mechanistic translations of Freud's work.

STUDIES IN HYSTERIA is a seminal study for both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It was written by Freud and Breuer. A long-standing but unfounded lie first told by Freud and passed on by Ernest Jones blames Breuer for abandoning "Anna O"--Bertha Pappenheim, the first analytic patient--because he couldn't handle her falling for him, but in truth he treated her long after the supposed cure he reports here. A case could be made for Breuer and Pappenheim being the actual originators of psychotherapy as a modern healing method.