The author disagrees with the view of the Freudian revolution as a rupture with the past, as the structuralist accounts have wanted to make it. It is rather at the heart

of nineteenth century psychiatric and medical thought. Freud may have effected a deconstruction, to borrow a concept from Derrida, of the anatomo-pathological hypothesis on hysteria. Many research efforts have now attempted to place Freud within the epistemological perspective of his era, but these have been primarily concerned with metapsychological concepts, and few have concerned themselves with the pre-history of the psychoanalytic setting. The author discusses Mesmer's career and his use of certain settings and paraphernalia such as a vessel (baquet) to contain his "magnetic fluid." He examines Mesmer's tremendous influence on thinkers and subsequent practitioners of "animal magnetism" in Germany and France in the years immediately following.