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One of the persistent fantasies which Freud had regarding his discoveries was a wish to anchor psychoanalysis in some ‘scientific’ foundation point, be it physiology, chemistry or evolutionary biology. This wish
persisted alongside another: the wish to establish the psychoanalyltic domain as separate and irreducible. Whereas considerable attention has been given to the medical or biological context within which psychoanalysis developed, the influence of nineteenth-century linguistics and philology on Freud's thought has been far less acknowledged. John Forrester's specialist book offers a reading of Freud whose focus is the centrality of language to psychoanalysis and the mode in which Freud often invoked linguistic/philological material as a further ‘scientific’ foundation to his discoveries. In some ways, Forrester's book could be seen as an extensive filling out of an argument once made by Michel Foucault (1970): that ‘Freud more than anyone else brought the knowledge of man closer to its philological and linguistic model’ (p. 361).
The first two chapters excavate some of the moments in the constitution of what Fräulein Anna O., the celebrated ‘first patient’ of psychoanalysis, described as the ‘talking cure’. This starts with a consideration of Freud's work on aphasia, which became his first book, its importance for the development of his early metapsychological speculations and how it helped to create the space for a new understanding of hysteria and neurosis. Within this new understanding, forged by Freud and Breuer in the 1890s, hysteria was no longer thought of as a mute disease to be classified but as something which communicates and to which the therapist needs to listen. The body of the hysteric was held to be suffused with meaning, bearing the mark or the symptoms of unconscious processes. At the same time, in terms of therapy, Freud became preoccupied with what he saw as the ‘magical power of words’ and the process through which neurotic symptoms might