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There seems to be a growing, intense fascination among professional psychoanalysts with the historical context of psychoanalysis. This fascination may well have started with Michel Foucault and his work on madness two decades ago, but it has become centered in recent years on the historical figure of Sigmund Freud.
Alfred Lorenzer, perhaps the most sophisticated psychoanalytic theorist now writing in the Federal Republic of Germany, has now turned to the history of psychoanalysis. He has produced a work which reveals his depth as a psychoanalyst, but many of the weaknesses of the amateur historian. Lorenzer, whose major contribution to the theory of the psyche has been his extraordinary work on the nature of the psychoanalytic symbol, treats in this volume the symbolic function of suffering within the realm of the treatment of mental illness. This book, originally a series of lectures held at the University in Frankfurt during the winter of 1982-1983, presents a teacher's attempt to translate the history of mental illness into palatable form for his students. The central motif, the nature of suffering and its function, is a good one, because it provides a cultural context for the clinical procedures developed to deal with the suffering of mental illness. Suffering is seen as a reality about which society constructs a disease. Each age and culture understands suffering differently and, therefore, proposes alternative means of dealing with it.
While this central thesis is convincing, the material Lorenzer brings to prove it is, I am afraid, quite old-hat. Lorenzer has read Foucault (and acknowledges him in his subtitle), Henri Ellenberger, and Frank Sulloway. He agrees with Ellenberger, disagrees with Sulloway, and accepts Foucault's approach. However, he borrows his historical materials directly from these three sources (and other recent histories of madness such as that by Klaus Dörner) without much thought to the differences among these authors' presentatio