Sigmund Freud’s opening lines of Analysis Terminable and Interminable

[Eva Libre]

“Experience has taught us that psychoanalytic therapy - the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions and abnormalities of character - is a time-consuming business.

Hence, from the very first, attempts have been made to shorten the duration of analyses. Such endeavours required no justification: they could claim to be based on the strongest considerations of reason and expediency.

But there was probably still at work in them as well some trace of the impatient contempt with which the medical science of an earlier day regarded the neuroses as being uncalled-for consequences of invisible injuries.

If it had now become necessary to attend to them, they should at least be disposed of as quickly as possible.”

Sigmund Freud’s opening lines of Analysis Terminable and Interminable