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In 1990 the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine sponsored a conference in Toronto on “Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis.” Professional historians and an assortment of other humanist scholars were the principal participants. Practicing psychoanalysts were in short supply. The fourteen papers appearing in this volume were the main products of the conference. All were “revisionist” essays—departures from those “official” and largely laudatory accounts of the emergence of psychoanalysis that tended to be written by psychoanalysts. In varying degrees, all fourteen found Freud and his followers less innovative, daring, and clinically effective than “official” accounts indicate. However, no more than one or two of the fourteen displayed personal animus toward Freud or his movement, and none demanded reformation of current psychoanalytically informed clinical practice. Hence, the “revisionism” was primarily on scholarly grounds. None of the contributors wrote preponderantly as “reformist” crusaders against the psychoanalytic profession.
Conference papers addressed four overlapping topics. One of the most interesting concerned thinkers who had anticipated Freud in various ways. Steven Marcus illustrated convincingly how Words- worth had developed a narrative mode which closely resembled the psychoanalytic life history. Unconscious desires and ideas were central. Like the psychoanalytic life history, Wordsworth's narrative was circular (i.e., neither linear nor unidirectional); it housed confluent and plural meanings. Rosemarie Sand disputed Freud's claim of discovering alone the central meanings of dreams. Freud had been moved in this direction by Charcot, Janet, and Krafft- Ebing. As he described Freud's stay in Paris in 1886, Toby Gelfand revealed how Charcot not only gave Freud his concept of hysteria; Charcot and his Parisian colleagues also did much to broaden Freud from a neuropathologist specializing in female hysteria toward a universal psychological th