<P> Freud's first theory to explain hysterical symptoms was presented in Studies on Hysteria (1895), co-authored with his mentor the distinguished physician Josef Breuer, which was generally seen as the birth of psychoanalysis . The work was based on Breuer's treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, referred to in case studies by the pseudonym "Anna O .", treatment which Pappenheim herself had dubbed the "talking cure". Breuer wrote that many factors that could result in such symptoms, including various types of emotional trauma, and he also credited work by others such as Pierre Janet; while Freud contended that at the root of hysterical symptoms were repressed memories of distressing occurrences, almost always having direct or indirect sexual associations . </P> <P> Around the same time Freud attempted to develop a neuro - physiological theory of unconscious mental mechanisms, which he soon gave up . It remained unpublished in his lifetime . </P> <P> The first occurrence of the term "psychoanalysis" (written psychoanalyse) was in Freud's essay "L'hérédité et l'étiologie des névroses" which was written and published in French in 1896 . </P> <P> In 1896 Freud also published his so - called seduction theory which proposed that the preconditions for hysterical symptoms are sexual excitations in infancy, and he claimed to have uncovered repressed memories of incidents of sexual abuse for all his current patients . However, by 1898 he had privately acknowledged to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed in his theory, though he did not state this publicly until 1906 . Though in 1896 he had reported that his patients "had no feeling of remembering the (infantile sexual) scenes", and assured him "emphatically of their unbelief", in later accounts he claimed that they had told him that they had been sexually abused in infancy . This became the received historical account until challenged by several Freud scholars in the latter part of the 20th century who argued that he had imposed his preconceived notions on his patients . However, building on his claims that the patients reported infantile sexual abuse experiences, Freud subsequently contended that his clinical findings in the mid-1890s provided evidence of the occurrence of unconscious fantasies, supposedly to cover up memories of infantile masturbation . Only much later did he claim the same findings as evidence for Oedipal desires . </P>

The two major ideas that characterized early psychological theories are