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Readers already familiar with the two papers Kuhn published in Psychoanalysis and History in 2014 on the origins of British ‘psychological medicine’ will find in his new book an extrapolation and elaboration of that preliminary research.1 He has set himself a dual task here: on the one hand to present the multitude of individuals and institutions in the field of mental treatment who were either directly receptive to Freud's message or were part of a culture that was open to new methods; and on the other to correct Jones's version, still prevalent today, of how psychoanalysis was first disseminated in Britain.
Because Kuhn acknowledges his debt of gratitude to the previous editor of Psychoanalysis and History, John Forrester, as ‘unwitting catalyst’ as well as ‘unwitting midwife’ to the book, I should note, though only in passing since my present remit is with Kuhn's book alone, that Cameron and Forrester's remarkable study, Freud in Cambridge, happened to appear within months of Kuhn's book. As both deal with the early reception of psychoanalysis (into medical culture in Kuhn's instance, into academia in Cameron and Forrester's), the two books complement each other.
Since Kuhn's start date is 1893, the year Freud and Breuer's studies of hysteria first appeared, and when neither the word nor practice of psychoanalysis yet existed, he is dealing with the transmission of a mobile concept and the sense of a new approach, rather than a fully-fledged doctrine, let alone a discipline. And since his end date is 1913, when Jones founded the London Psycho-Analytical Society - which Kuhn summarily (and justifiably) dismisses as ‘a very paltry affair’ (p. 365) - he is concerned not with psychoanalytical history as seen through its own organizations but with an overview of those groups and institutions already active in the area of ‘mental healing’.
Kuhn's book is the first in-depth study of this gradual infiltration of psychoanalytical ideas into Britain during those early years.