ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis exerts one of the most dominant and pervasive influences on contemporary thought. It provides not simply a series of popular expressions, at times somewhat divorced from their clinical origins, but also endures as a continual touchstone defining and delimiting the aspirations of contemporary thinking. This chapter concerns the relationship between Freud and Breuer; or more specifically an interpretation of Freud's break with Breuer. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud attempts to connect the science of psychoanalysis to other sciences via their having shared procedures. Freud's 1915 papers18 'Repression' and 'The Unconscious' are two of the important series written at that period which grouped together are known as the Metapsychological Papers. The text by Breuer and Freud is concerned, in part, with the meaning of the hysterical symptom, therefore what emerges as constitutive of the enframed text is the relationship between the structure of signification inherent in the text and the consequent semantics of the symptom.
