In his early cases, Freud construed his patients’ illness as hysteria and set about uncovering the traumatic incidents that lay at their basis. One technique he used (from Bernheim) was the infamous pressure technique. This consisted in applying pressure to the patient’s forehead and instructing them to report “whatever appeared before their inner eye or passed through their memory at the moment of pressure.” Freud came to regard this Tech as infallible, even maintaining that if nothing irrupted during the first application of pressure, subsequent squeezes invariably would.