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In this scholarly and closely reasoned book, Arnold Davidson considers the origin of a conceptual schema that created three institutions: psychiatry as a medical discipline, psychoanalysis as a theory of the mind and a treatment modality for mental illness, and sexuality as a science of desire. He elegantly shows how this schema—the medical diagnosis and treatment of actions, thoughts, and feelings—developed in the nineteenth century, replacing the idea that madness was a theological problem. Following Foucault on this path, he extends historical epistemology to assert that concepts (in the philosophical sense) are not fixed and given Platonic ideals, but rather pieces of a world view that changes with historical circumstance and, he implies, with the evolution of thought. His book is timely now that the paths of psychiatry and psychoanalysis seem to be diverging—the former toward medicalization, while the latter develops into a talking cure administered by psychologists, social workers, and others. In our time, the concept of mental illness is developing along a bifurcation between (on the one side) dispensers of medications for anxiety, depression, hyperactivity, schizophrenia, and other specific symptom constellations, and (on the other) patient and painstakingly slow exploration of a person's thoughts and feelings with the goal of achieving the most adaptive and least painful compromises among one's wishes, fears, moral ideals, and relationships with others. To see where we are going, it may help to see where we have been. From this point of view, Davidson's history of our concepts and their relations is valuable for analysts.
Davidson credits Foucault with the discovery that medicalization of the behaviors previously categorized by Augustine as religious