Freud was excited when he heard this. He began to try to cure his patients in the same way. He asked about the events of their early childhood. He urged them to talk about their own experiences and relationships. He himself said very little.
Often, as he listened, his patients relived moments from their past life. They trembled with anger and fear, hate and love. They acted as though Freud was their father or mother or lover.
The doctor did not make any attempt to stop them. He quietly accepted whatever they told him, the good things and the bad.
One young woman who came to him couldn't drink anything, although she was very thirsty. Something prevented her from drinking.
Freud discovered the reason for this. One day, as they were talking, the girl remembered having seen a dog drink from her nurse's glass. She hadn't told the nurse, whom she disliked. She had forgotten the whole experience. But suddenly this childhood memory returned to mind. When she had told it all to Dr Freud--the nurse, the dog, the glass of water --the girl was able to drink again.
Freud called this treatment the 'talking cure'. Later it was called psychoanalysis. When patients talked freely about the things that were troubling them they often felt better.
The things that patients told him sometimes gave Freud a shock. He discovered that the feelings of very young children are not so different from those of their parents. A small boy may love his mother so much that he wants to kill his father. At the same time he loves his father and is deeply ashamed of this wish. It is difficult to live with such mixed feelings, so they fade away1into the unconscious mind and only return in troubled dreams.
It was hard to believe that people could become blind, or lose the power of speech, because of what had happened to them when they were children. Freud was attacked from all sides for what he discovered. But he also found firm friends. Many people believed that he had at last found a way to unlock the secrets of the human mind, and to help people who were very miserable. He had found the answer to many of life's great questions.
He became famous all over the world and taught others to use the talking cure. His influence on modern art, literature and science cannot be measured. People who wrote books and plays, people who painted pictures, people who worked in schools, hospitals and prisons; all these learned something from the great man who discovered a way into the unconscious mind.
Not all of Freud's ideas are accepted today. But others have followed where he led and have helped us to understand ourselves better. Because of him, and them, there is more hope today than there has ever been before for people who were once just called "crazy".
