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Historians of science have known for decades that psychoanalysis did not emerge, like the Greek goddess Athena, full-blown from its creator's head; rather, it arose from a confluence of late 19th-century scientific, philosophical, and psychological theories and practices. Freud was generally willing to pay tribute to the poets and philosophers who had long ago discovered the unconscious, but he was less willing to acknowledge indebtedness to his mentors and rivals such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis. Their medical research was too close to his own, awakening the anxiety of influence.
Every age seems to have its own particular illness, and for Freud and his contemporaries it was the enigmatic disease of hysteria, which was characterized by physical symptoms of illness that had no clear organic cause. Hysteria became for Freud the mysterious malady from which he constructed psychoanalytic theory. Understanding the illness required him to locate a connection between psyche and soma and thus to find the mechanism that allowed bodily sensations, innervations, and excitations to be inscribed in memories and symbols. The relationship between body and mind has long preoccupied philosophers and scientists, but Freud made this the central question of psychoanalysis and, in doing so, participated in the development of a new view of consciousness, one based on multiple subjectivity.
Dianne Sadoff's Science of the Flesh demonstrates in exhaustive if sometimes exhausting detail the ways in which Freud invented what she calls plausible bridges between soma and psyche in order to understand hysteria's strange symptoms and disordered subjectivities. She provides us not only with a history of hysteria but also a new account of Freud's appropriation and transmuting of his