The concept of abreaction may have been initially formulated by Freud's mentor, Josef Breuer;[1] but it was in their joint work of 1895, Studies on Hysteria, that it was first made public to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma could be discharged by talking about it.
[2] The release of strangulated affect by bringing a particular moment or problem into conscious focus, and thereby abreacting the stifled emotion attached to it, formed the cornerstone of Freud's early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms.
[6] Early in his career, psychoanalyst Carl Jung expressed interest in abreaction, or what he referred to as trauma theory, but later decided it had limitations in treatment of neurosis.
[10] In Scientology, Dianetics is a form of abreaction that science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard borrowed from the United States Navy[11] when he spent three months in a San Diego hospital in 1943 with the complaints of an ulcer and malaria.
[12] Hubbard later wrote, in his autobiography My Philosophy, that he had observed abreactive therapy in the hospital, though in later life he claimed to have made the discovery on his own after being wounded in battle and given up as untreatable.