ab-reaction in hypnosis, I encountered two obstacles, the pursuit of which led me to change the technique as well as the conception. ( I ) Not all persons were hypnotizable who undoubtedly showed hysterical symptoms, and in whom there most probably existed the same psychic mechanism. (2) I had to question what essentially characterizes hysteria, and in what it differs from other neuroses.
How I overcame the first difficulty, and what it taught me, I will show later. I will first state what position I have taken in my daily practice towards the second problem. It is very difficult to examine a case of neurosis before it has been subjected to a thorough analysis, such as would result only through the application of Breuer's method. But before we have such a thorough knowledge we are obliged to decide upon the diagnosis and kind of treatment. Hence the only thing remaining for me was to select such cases for the cathartic method which could, for the time being, be diagnosed as hysteria, and which showed some or many stigmata, or the characteristic symptoms of hysteria. Yet it sometimes happened that in spite of the diagnosis of hysteria the therapeutic results were very poor, and even the analysis revealed nothing of importance. At other times I attempted to treat cases which no one took for hysteria by Breuer's method, and I found that I could influence them,, and even cure them. Such, for example, was my experience with obsessions, the real obsessions of Westphal's type, cases which did not show a single feature of hysteria. Thus the psychic mechanism revealed in the "Preliminary Communication" could not be pathognomonic of hysteria. Nor could I for the sake of this mechanism throw so many neuroses into the same pot with hysteria. From all the investigated doubts I finally seized upon a plant to treat all the other neuroses in question just like hysteria, to investigate the etiology and the form of psychic mechanisms, and to leave the diagnosis of hysteria to be dependent upon the result of this investigation.
It thus happened that, proceeding from Breuer's methods, I occupied myself mostly with the etiology and the mechanism of the neuroses. After a relatively brief period I was fortunate in obtaining useful results. I then became cognizant of the fact that if we may speak of a reason for the acquirement of neuroses
