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For a practising clinician to be immersed in historiography, for example quoting the difficult and multilayered writing of Michel De Certeau (1988) is arresting. However, Sanfelipo is not only an analyst with over 20 years of clinical experience, but also the Coordinator for the Centre for the History of Psychoanalysis at the National Library of Argentina. So, his book is a rare thing, a work that is, at one of its focal points, deeply knowledgeable of the internal development of psychoanalysis, yet also mindful of the nuances of broader historical and cultural factors. First published in Spanish in 2018, this new translation makes it available to an English readership for the first time.
The book is organized into five chapters. They refer to progressive chronological periods, which also reflect the deepening of psychological thinking about trauma
over time. Chapter 1 is on the initial “psychologization” of trauma from 1860 to 1890, and looks at railway accidents, insurance claims for injury and disability and the (overlapping) debates on hysteria, across England, Germany and France.
In Britain the Railway Passengers Assurance Company was established in 1849, and Sanfelippo discusses then current theories such as those of J. E. Erichsen (1866) and H. Page (1883) on “concussion of the spine”, without obvious lesions of the vertebral column, so called “railway spine”. [Correction added on 12 June 2025, after first online publication: The citations in the preceding sentence have been corrected here and in the References, in this version.] In France, as Sanfelippo relates, Charcot investigated hysteria at the Salpêtrière, including industrial accidents. As we learn, a new emphasis was given to emotion and ideas by Charcot, while still being inserted into a physiological conceptual matrix. This is a very good and well-researched account; however, for readers particularly interested in this period, it could be supplemented by reading M. Micale and P. Lerner's even more