Freud, trained as a medical doctor, turned to psychology after studying treatment of the neurotic disorder hysteria with the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. In the 1890s he collaborated with Viennese physician Josef Breuer in an early improvisation on what would become psychoanalytic treatment of that disorder – one in which patients exhibited behavioral symptoms ranging from tics to severe paralysis, all without organic basis.

His theory originated in that experience and remained accountable to his clinical observations thereafter. In 1909, by invitation of the president of Clark University in Massachusetts, Freud presented some of those observations to a predominantly lay audience. His addresses, published as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, engage both theory and therapy; their ongoing synergy would drive Freud's contribution then and going forward.

Freud makes the critical point in that slender work that psychopathological symptoms, like more evidently rational behavior, have a sense. They are determined, by which he means they follow coherently from some premise in the person's mind. They serve a purpose. Thus, the human mind, and even the diseased human mind, as Freud conceives it, is not a mad, seething cauldron; it has integrity and structure.

After grounding his conception in an illustration of psychopathology, Freud calls for and proposes a psychological explanation of mental illness. Then, drawing on his clinical experience, he outlines techniques of psychoanalytic therapy through which he found it possible to uncover the source of individual ailments and cure them. Next he describes a general etiology of disorder that has resulted from his efforts, which brings him to a discussion of what he calls the sexual function and its place in human development. He concludes with an extrapolation to the nature of psychological health.

THE SENSE OF SYMPTOMS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR UNCONSCIOUS MENTATION

In his first lecture, Freud discusses a case of hysteria treated by Breuer and draws from its symptoms and treatment a justification of the existence of unconscious mentation. Before Breuer, hysterias, labeled as such by the medical establishment in keeping with the ancient Greek designation, were held to be associated with previous emotional shock and were largely dismissed.