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How did germ influence psychoanalysis? This is the sort of question George Makari takes up in his new exploration of the history of psychoanalysis. The past decade has seen a number of books on the history of the psychoanalytic movement (Schwartz 1999; Zaetsky 2004) and now Makari's Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis can be welcomed as the latest offering on an important and often neglected part of our field. George Makari is the Director of the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Cornell University and a psychoanalyst. He offers an erudite and compelling tale of Sigmund Freud's quest to be a scientist after his failed experiments with cocaine, and the subsequent formation of a movement dedicated to the science of the psyche. This group struggled against itself as the schisms and fractures simultaneously bolstered, cohered and fragmented its burgeoning development.
What sets Makari's work apart and makes this book noteworthy is his attempt to locate the origins of psychoanalysis in the science of its day. His historiographic strategy is externalist rather than internalist. He pulls back from Freud the man and with a wide angle lens focuses on the sciences which surrounded the early pioneers of psychoanalysis. While the psychoanalytic cast of characters may be familiar to those within the field, the supporting cast of characters in Makari's story will be unfamiliar to many. For him, psychoanalytic theory did not so much spring from Freud's unconscious, as he explored his dreams, as it did from translating and arguing with Charcot and Bernheim and reading Brucke, Exner, Meynert, and Fechner along with the influence of Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, Schrenck-Notzing and Havelock Ellis. Freud becomes a magpie stealing bright and shiny ideas for the psychoanalytic nest, and borrowing the best of French psychopathology, biophysics and psychophysics and sexology to construct his theory.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section, ‘Making Freudi