Can brain-scanning help save Freudian psychoanalysis ?
In 1900, Sigmund Freud, a Viennese specialist in
nervous disorders, began treating the 18-year-old daughter of a rich
acquaintance. Freud, who was 44, was just beginning to practice psychoanalysis,
a form of therapy that would become known as ‘the talking cure.’ The girl, whom
Freud would later refer to as ‘‘Dora,’’ had a cluster of inexplicable symptoms:
Her mood was low, she was prone to losing consciousness and, for weeks at a
time, she could not speak above a whisper. Freud diagnosed hysteria, a term
commonly used in fin de siècle Europe to refer to a disorder in which
psychological stress was expressed through physical symptoms. Freud traced
Dora’s condition in part to her father’s sexual infidelities that she had felt
obliged, from early adolescence, to help orchestrate. When Dora told Freud, in
the course of the analysis, that her father’s friend — Herr K., a married man
decades her senior — had accosted her in his empty office building, trying to
kiss her on her lips, Freud, trained in biology and swept up in his own
scientific detachment, couldn’t empathize with her distress. One day, after
only 11 weeks of treatment and still far from cured, she stood up at the end of
a session, wished Freud a happy new year and never returned.
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