For my Summary and Response paper, I chose to write about Freud’s first lecture and his
observations about the general attitude of doctors towards patients with hysteria or hysterical
symptoms. My response will be built off of the argument that such patients were not taken
seriously and how it relates to the series of events in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. One of the points
that Freud brings up is the effectiveness as well as the under use of talking cure or “chimney
sweeping” as treatment for patients with hysteria and how it seemed to have completely
different outcomes to more commonly used methods like medication or bed rest. The treatment
of the main character in TYW is similar to that of the doctors criticized by Freud, and this seems
to be a determining factor in the events of the text, as well as why the text was written in the first
place. I personally feel that this is an important point to emphasize in my response since the
narrator’s wellbeing was in the hands of those who were not giving her proper care, and
because no other options (other than medications and bed rest) were given, her mental health
deteriorated. This would have been entirely preventable given the right steps, and Freud’s
examples of talk therapy in lecture one are a clear example of that.
One of the first cases that Freud introduces is that of a woman who suffers from
hydrophobia but does not understand why. Given any other doctor, she would have likely been
labeled as hysterical and been given medications or rest orders. However, as Freud mentions,
Dr. Breuer attempts talking cure with her and manages to bring her to a hypnotic state where
she is able to recall where her aversion to water originated. Through a number of such
sessions the woman’s hydrophobia was then understood and managed, and her understanding
of her own feeling guided by Breuer allowed her to make a recovery that easily beats whatever
“most doctors” would have prescribed for her. This example comes to mind when I think about
TYW, because it is likely that the narrator’s “nervous depression” had an origin that could have
been tackled using talking cure. Once again, this is never even considered, though it would
have likely changed the way the story ended.

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