After Breuer's discovery, putting into practice the "chimney sweeping" so justly christened by his patient this method of treatment has evolved into shorter psychoanalytical methods, which we will now discuss in succession in their main points.
In his use of the primitive method, Freud depended upon the time saving of hypnotism and upon the circumstance that many could not be brought into the desired deep degree of provoked sleep. The aim of this operation was to call up in the patient another state of consciousness, in which it would be possible for him to remember facts which had given cause for the origin of the phenomena, facts which thus far had remained hidden from the ordinary daily consciousness. By questioning the patient when in this state, or by spontaneous production of phantasies communicated by the patient while in hypnosis, memories come to light and affects connected with them are relaxed (these are abreagirt [rearranged], as the expression is) and the desired cure is attained. This just-mentioned method (cathartic, cleansing) and more especially the modified one, which aims especially at the promotion of a spontaneous production of phantasies communicated by the patient while under hypnotism, is still used in practice by some investigators. In what follows we go still further back—Freud next sought for a method to render hypnotism unnecessary. He discovered it by applying an artifice which he had seen Bernheim use during a visit (1887) to the latter's clinic at Nancy. Bernheim demonstrated upon a hypnotized patient how the amnesia of the somnambulist is only an appearance.
With this aim in view, Freud from then on ceased to hypnotize his patients and substituted for that method, "spontaneous ideas." This means that when the analysis of a patient who is awake is obstructed, and has come to a dead stop, he is told to communicate anything which comes into his mind, no matter what idea, what thought, even if the thing were very queer to him or seemed meaningless. In the material thus obtained the thread should be found leading to the semi-forgotten, the thing hidden in the consciousness. In single cases—where the resistance toward bringing into consciousness the forgotten or repressed thing, the complex, was slight—this method of treatment very quickly attains its end, but in others where the resistance was greater, the spontaneous ideas merely brought about indirect representations, mere allusions as it were to the forgotten element. Here favorable results either were not so readily obtained, or else were entirely lacking. In conjunction with this, Freud planned a simple method of interpretation by means of which, from the material thus obtained, the repressed complexes could be brought to consciousness.
Independently of Freud, the Zurich school (Bleuler, Jung) had planned the association method in order to penetrate into the patient's subconsciousness. The value of this method is chiefly a theoretical experimental one; it leads to an orientation of large circumference, but necessarily superficial in regard to the subconscious conflict (complex).
Freud compares its importance for the psychoanalyticus; with the importance of the qualitative analysis for the chemist.
Not being completely satisfied with his method of spontaneous ideas Freud sought shorter paths to the subconscious, and therefore undertook the study of the dream-life (dealing with forgetfulness, speaking to one's self, making mistakes, giving offense to one's self, and with superstition and absent-mindedness, and the study of word quibbles taken in their widest sense), to all of which we are indebted for the possession of his three important books: "Die Traumdeutung?" (First edition 1900, third edition 1912); "Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens" (1901-1907); "Der Witz und seine Bedeutung zum Unbewussten" (1905).
Because of the discovery of the repressed and the forbidden in the soul life, the instructions contained in the three last-named works are of great importance and of help to us in the study of the spontaneous ideas of the patient brought to light by free association. But what is of more importance for analysis is the study of what may well be termed Freud's masterpiece, "Die Traumdeutung."
Jung expresses himself as follows in regard to Freud's ingenious discovery.
"It can be said of the dream that the stone which was despised by the architect has become the corner-stone. The acorn of the dream, of the ephemeral and inconsiderable product of our soul, dates from the earliest times. Before that, men saw in the dream a prophecy for the future, a warning spirit, a comforter, a messenger of the gods. Now we join forces with it in order to explore the subconscious, to unravel the mysteries which it jealously guards and conceals. The dream does this with a completeness which amazes us. Freud's exact analysis has taught that the dream as it presents itself to us, exhibits merely a facade, which betrays nothing of the inmost part of the house. But where, by attention to certain rules we are able to bring the dreamer to express the sudden ideas awakened in him in talking over the sub-division of his dream, then it very quickly appears that the sudden ideas follow a determined direction, and are centralized about certain subjects, possessing a personal significance and betraying a meaning, which in the beginning would not have been suspected back of the dream, but which stand in a very close symbolical relation, even to details, to the dream facade. This peculiar thought-complex, in which all the threads of the dream are united, is the looked-for conflict in a certain variation which is determined by the circumstances. What is painful and contradictory in the conflict is so confused here that one can speak of a wish-fulfillment; let us, however, immediately add that the fulfilled wishes apparently are not wishes, but are such as frequently are contradictory to them. As an example let us use the case of a daughter who inwardly loves her mother and dreams that the latter is dead, much to her sorrow. Dreams like this are frequent. The contents make us think as little as possible of a wish-fulfillment, and so one might perhaps get the idea that Freud's assertion—that the dream presents in dramatic form a subconscious wish of the dreamer—is unjust.
That happens because the non-initiated does not know how to differentiate between manifest and latent (evident and hidden) dream contents. Where the conflict worked over in the dream is unconscious, the solution, the wish arising from it, is also unconscious. In the chosen example, the dreamer wished to have the mother out of the way; in the language of the subconscious it says: I wish that mother would die. We are aware that a certain part of the subconscious possesses everything which we can no longer remember consciously, and especially an entirely thoughtless, childish wish. One can confidently say that most of what arises from the subconscious has an infantile character, as does this so simple sounding wish: "Tell me, father, if mother died would you marry me?" The infantile expression of a wish is the predecessor of a recent wish for marriage, which in this case we discover is painful to the dreamer. This thought, the seriousness of the included meaning is, as we say, "repressed into the subconscious" and can there necessarily express itself only awkwardly and childishly, because the subconscious limits the material at its disposal, preferably, to memories of childhood and, as recent researches of the Zurich school have shown, to "Memories of the race," stretching far beyond the limits of the individual.