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Historians of psychoanalysis believe that the first rudimentary psychosexual theory of hysteria appeared in the early 16th century A.D. This report suggests that such a theory actually was enunciated in the mid-4th century B.C. by Plato. For longer than two millenia, however, scholars and scientists—Freud (1925, p. 24) among them, for he accepted Havelock Ellis's erroneous statement (1898, p. 600) on this matter—have thought that Plato, in common with his culture, believed in the fantastic notion of the “wandering uterus.” This unruly organ the ancient Mediterranean world believed to migrate throughout the body and cause what we now call “hysteria” (Aubert, 1989, p. 424). An old misunderstanding of a passage in the ancient Greek text of Plato's Timaeus has perpetuated this belief.
Recently, I completed a textual, contextual, and historical study of that original Greek passage to test the validity of the age-old belief in Plato's error. That study concluded, and for the first time documented, that Plato actually believed the sexual impulse, not the uterus itself, ranged throughout the body. Here I summarize that study and make some brief remarks on the relevance of this finding to the history and clinical practice of psychoanalysis.
Until the 16th century, when Paracelsus declared that hysterical symptoms arose from unconscious fantasy and had a sexual meaning (Sigerist, 1941, p. 142), no one—so it had been thought—had suggested a psychological explanation for these symptoms. Until his statement, and then for two centuries thereafter, physiological explanations, only some of which were less fantastic than the wandering