From Freud's Consulting Room: The Unconscious in a Scientific Age by Judith M. Hughes Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1994,  x + 235 pp., $27.95.

In this book, Judith Hughes examines Freud's evolving engagement with philosophical issues pertinent to psychoanalysis. While her effort does not break new historical or theoretical ground, it is an appealingly crafted and highly accessible account of how Freud's encounters with suffering patients led him to define a domain of psychoanalytic investigation and practice distinct from those claimed by the medical and psychological disciplines of his day.

Hughes structures the book into five chapters. Because their subject matter is familiar and Hughes's treatment of it uncontroversial, I will only briefly summarize them. In the first, “Space for Meaning/Intention/Purpose,” she uses the work of Henry James to recall the limits of psychology before Freud. She reviews James's consideration of the work of Janet and Myers on hysteria, work that left unexplained the nature of the intrapsychic processes constitutive of the disorder. In grappling with this question, James dismissed the idea of an unconscious: “There is only one phase in which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condition. If it