"Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born in the twentieth
century," Freud said late in his career, "but it did not drop from
the skies ready-made." And in his speculative theories of
modernism, Bruno Latour argued that "no science can exit from the
network of its practice." Deploying Latour's model of scientific
theory production, this book argues that the historical emergence
of psychoanalysis depended on nineteenth-century scientific
practices: laboratory experimentation, medical transmission of
research findings along collegial or social networks, and medical
representation of illness--including case studies, amphitheatrical
demonstration of cases, hospital records of symptoms, and
laboratory graphology and photography of patients.
The author shows how hysteria enabled Freud to appropriate medical
and scientific concepts from neurology, sexology, gynecology,
psychiatry, and existing rest cures and psychotherapies. His new
model eschewed physiological determinism, linking unconscious
ideation with counterwill and reproduced memory, psychosexual
experience, and affect-laden images of object relations (usually
with family members).
Constructing around himself a psychoanalytic circle and
establishing training institutions, Freud translated this new
psycho-physical body and hybrid subjectivity to other research
sites. Just as in the 1890's he had used the figure of the hysteric
to mobilize theory production, by the 1920's he had replaced the
hysteric with a modernized figure, the homosexual. Freud used
autobiography, summary, and outline to stabilize his concepts and
control the dissemination of his new science. Psychoanalysis had
successfully created new scientific "plausible bridges" between
psyche and soma, nature and the social, to produce a modern theory
of hybrid subjectivity that was rooted in yet conceptually
separated from the body.
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