"The talking cure" or "chimney sweeping," as Breuer and Anna O., respectively, called it, seemed to act cathartically to produce an abreaction, or discharge, of the pent-up emotional blockage at the root of the pathological behaviour.
And, on this view, recovery would be a result of the liberation of the affect that had gone astray and of its discharge along a normal path ("Abreaction").
Christine Smallwood, a faculty member who was sitting in on the class, said, "My first question is about abreaction; my second question is about catharsis; my third question is about cathexis".
He experienced an abreaction that faded with two sets of eye movements and, by the end of the first session, he reported "feeling joy at being alive".
Hamann's abreaction to what he viewed as a misguided deification and purification of reason reaches a climax in 1784, in his unpublished response to Kant — "Metacritique of the Purism of Reason" (1984) and in an inflamed private letter to Christian Jacob Kraus in the same year.
For Baudrillard, "the speeches and commentaries made since September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts.
A lot of his notes last for a long time, and each one counts more than it used to; in the theme of his own "Abreaction," playing slowly over Mr. Wilson's fast and quiet free-rhythm drumming, he designs a different kind of sound for each note, an individual density and story.
Titled "Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release," the video is a prime example of Mr. McCarthy's careerlong fascination with the underbelly of popular culture.
Several of his works have been set there, like "Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release," a notorious 1992 installation and video he created in collaboration with Mike Kelley, in which Heidi, Johanna Spyri's Swiss heroine, is put through surprising travails involving her grandfather and a goat.
M.P.D. supporters started backpedalling, changing the name of the disorder, and even backing away from the central treatments--hypnosis, abreactions, alter-probing.
Some clients are totally nonverbal, some are over-precise with regard to linguistic usage, some show little emotion, some overreact and show fierce abreactions, sometimes the process goes incredibly fast, while in other cases it takes a lot of time.
