It remained to show in detail the
mechanism by which the most potent of all the emotions effects its
influence, and, by attempting to do this, the Viennese investigators,
Breuer and especially Freud, have greatly aided the study of
hysteria.[272] They have not, it is important to remark, overturned the
positive elements in their great forerunner's work. Freud began as a
disciple of Charcot, and he himself remarks that, in his earlier
investigations of hysteria, he had no thought of finding any sexual
etiology for that malady; he would have regarded any such suggestion as an
insult to his patient. The results reached by these workers were the
outcome of long and detailed investigation. Freud has investigated many
cases of hysteria in minute detail, often devoting to a single case over a
hundred hours of work. The patients, unlike those on whom the results of
the French school have been mainly founded, all belonged to the educated
classes, and it was thus possible to carry out an elaborate psychic
investigation which would be impossible among the uneducated. Breuer and
Freud insist on the fine qualities of mind and character frequently found
among the hysterical. They cannot accept suggestibility as an invariable
characteristic of hysteria, only abnormal excitability; they are far from
agreeing with Janet (although on many points at one with him), that
psychic weakness marks hysteria; there is merely an appearance of mental
weakness, they say, because the mental activity of the hysterical is split
up, and only a part of it is conscious.
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