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We are passing through the years that witness the centennial of psychoanalysis. Although no single year is the overwhelming candidate, few will disagree with Ilse Grubrich-Simitis that Studies on Hysteria, first published in 1895, deserves to be called the “primal book” (Urbuch) of psychoanalysis. Freud, of course, often referred to his collaboration with Breuer as indispensable for the development of his views, even asserting in 1909 that Breuer brought psychoanalysis into being. In his preface to the second, unrevised edition of the Studies , Freud observed that the germs of his subsequent theories were present in the book. Almost 30 years after the first edition, in “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis,” Freud was still calling the cathartic method the nucleus of psychoanalysis. The importance of the Studies to the history of psychoanalysis is undeniable, and Grubrich-Simitis's accompanying essay to this handsomely produced facsimile of the first edition is a superb introduction. (Grubrich-Simitis, 1995, is a version of this essay with additions intended for specialists; it is the one under review.)
Grubrich-Simitis begins by sketching the intellectual context in which the Studies arose, its place in the program of its publisher, Franz Deuticke, and reviews by its contemporaries. All of the reviews she mentions, as well as Erwin Runkle's, appear in Kiell (1988). Although not reviews of the book, Edouard Brissaud's and William James's notices of the “Preliminary Communication” deserve mention, as they show contemporary appreciation of the close connection with French views of hysteria. Because of the prominence Breuer and Freud accorded the work of Pierre Janet,