http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2289524947

Young Doctor Freud

This first episode relates how Freud, as a young scientist at the end of the 19th century, was fascinated by the brain. An aspiring neurologist, he traveled to Paris, where doctors were trying to understand the mental illness known as "hysteria," and witnessed its treatment with hypnosis. Freud committed himself to finding the cause of hysteria and its cure. Returning to Vienna, he began medical practice treating nervous disorders. To cure his patients, he tried, then abandoned, hypnotism, inventing his own treatment based on "free association" and interpreting dreams. As he struggled to formulate his theories, Freud was tormented by headaches, palpitations, and depression. To his horror, he came to believe that hysteria was caused by childhood sexual abuse.

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