Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis (review)

"Psycho-analysis," Sigmund Freud famously noted in 1923, "did not drop from the skies ready-made....Any history of it must therefore begin with an account of the influence which determined its origin and should not overlook the times and circumstances that preceded its creation" (xiii). Dianne Sadoff critically engages with her epigraph in this fascinating and intricately researched study of the shaping of the notion of the subject in Freud's research and writing in the 1880s and 1890s. Freud's debt to the burgeoning neurological, medical, and psychotherapeutic sciences of late-nineteenth-century France, Austria, and Germany, and to the longer past of mesmerism and hypnotism, has long been recognised. But the history of psychoanalysis has still tended to take the form either of a genealogy, in which Freud inherits and appropriates a series of models and methods, and ultimately remains caught within their paradigms; or of an epistemological break in which the revolutionary emergence of psychoanalysis is celebrated, with Freud as founding father. Sadoff, in contrast, unpacks psychoanalysis as both innovative and deeply embedded in a diverse set of medical, scientific, and institutional contexts. Drawing on Bruno Latour's theories of scientific mediation and translation, she explores the process by which specific and overlapping concepts are transformed across discursive boundaries and within specific settings. In doing so, she makes a significant contribution to psychological and intellectual historiography by investigating the precise ways in which Freud was able to extrapolate from research and practice in neurology, hypnosis, gynaecology, psychotherapy, and sexology, building "plausible bridges" which enabled him to transmute concepts from one site to another and to reconceptualise the relationship between mind and body, psyche and soma.

In describing this process of multiple determination and complex mediation, the narrative method of Sciences of the Flesh shares with its subject a palimpsestic quality as it reworks cases and stories within these fluctuating discursive histories. Sadoff emphasises, firstly, that the series of shifts in the analysis of the relationship between the mind and body in medical and mental science enabled Freud to use hysteria as the primary site on which he could build these conceptual links by relating psyche to soma through a developing theory of representation during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Here her work shares certain qualities with Mark Micale's work on hysteria, and the specific issues of interpretation and representation that it poses. Sadoff argues, however, that only by transposing the interpretative strategies adumbrated around hysteria onto the figure of the female homosexual could Freud fully develop his theory of modern subjectivity, rooted in sexuality. She stresses that the position of the analysand as both object and subject of scientific scrutiny could be explored fully only within the complex narrative strategies that Freud elaborated in the genre of the case history itself. Here the consulting room becomes an experimental laboratory forged round the patients' own speech, and while Emmy von N is the prototype in the first movement of Freud's career, he only fully develops his analysis of modern subjectivity in writing Dora's story.

The first part of Sciences of the Flesh analyses the precise ways in which Freud was able to transform existing research and treatments of hysteria—in neurologically based reflex theory, hypnotism and theories of dissociation, and gynaecology and the "rest cure"—in arriving at a notion of the self in which the hidden traces of the mind could be at once expressed and symbolically transformed in somatic symptoms. Freud drew on a long history of discussion of unconscious cerebration, mental dissociation, and neurological reflex that had emerged through the second half of the nineteenth century, and Sadoff situates his work within this detailed matrix. Charting Freud's critical engagement with his early mentors, Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, she investigates how he was able to rewrite reflex theory as...