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With this book, author Andreas Mayer aims to “shift the focus from larger cultural or social contexts and the work of classification to the concrete sites of knowledge production,” and “to elucidate how conflicts centered on the theories and experimental techniques of hypnosis paved the way for the familiar psychoanalytic setting established by Sigmund Freud in Vienna around 1900” (p. 5).
In this context, Sites of the Unconscious: Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting could be understood as origins—that is, as the stories of the early practitioners who discovered and experimented with the mind and its phenomena. Part 1 details the work of Freud, Charcot, Bernheim, Liebeault, and many lesser-known experimenters. The enormous literature produced by these early hypnotists about their theories and clinical practice is discussed and illustrated by Mayer with great thoroughness. The conflict between various practitioners and their critics is laid out in detail. Charcot and Bernheim, in particular, differed in their views and argued vociferously about various aspects of hypnosis.