What are the historical antecedents of TIR?
TIR grew mainly out of the work of Carl Rogers and Sigmund Freud. In “Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis”, Freud describes a method to resolve sequences of similar traumas: “What left the symptom behind was not always a single experience. On the contrary, the result was usually brought about by the convergence of several traumas, and often by the repetition of a great number of similar ones. Thus it was necessary to reproduce the whole chain of pathogenic memories in chronological order, or rather in reversed order, the latest ones first and the earliest ones last; and it was quite impossible to jump over the later traumas in order to get back more quickly to the first, which was often the most potent one.” Freud later abandoned this technique in favor of free-association. It seems likely that (in retrospect) the reason it didn’t work well was the degree of “interference” the analyst introduced by interpretations and by forcing the analysand in various ways, and the lack of a system
