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

Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis. By Dianne Sadoff. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 372. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Sciences of the Flesh is a new chart of old territory. While many critical maps of the prehistory and early history of psychoanalysis have been drawn in the past, Dianne Sadoff argues that we need one that traces how "shifts in nineteenth-century medical and scientific theories of psycho-physical correlation enabled Freud to reinvent, as a means of understanding hysteria's enigmatic symptoms and disordered subjectivities, 'plausible bridges' between soma and psyche" (p. 4). Sadoff covers a vast terrain of relevant medical and scientific theories including premodern theories of hysteria, nineteenth-century debates about the ethics of animal experimentation, rest cures, neuropathology, and sexology. In critical readings of scientific writings, she excavates theoretical assumptions about the link between body and mind, and traces the emergence of psychoanalysis as a modernist theory of socially determined subjectivity.

The first half of this book lays out shifts from what Sadoff calls "reflex theories" toward "representational theories" of the mind-body link or "psycho-physical correlation." Reflex theorists, such as Breuer, imagined the psyche as reducible to neurological phenomena such as reflex arcs. Representational theorists, such as Freud, imagined physical phenomena, such as hysterical symptoms, to be linked to the mind through representation. However, Sciences of the Flesh is more than an idealist history of the philosophy of mind. Drawing on science studies, Sadoff argues that reflex and representational theories, like all scientific claims, depend upon social practice. For example, she argues that patients' memories of dreams and childhood scenes provided Freud with the texts he needed to write a representational theory of mind in which hysterical symptoms became theorized as somatic representations of psychological phenomena. Sadoff similarly argues that Freud constructed his representational theory, in part, from the practice of teaching hysterical patients to adopt the position of spectator on their own constructed memories of childhood scenes.

Toward the second half of the book, Sadoff argues that Freud shifted his attention away from the female hysteric toward the male homosexual as the central figure of psychoanalysis. Again she draws on science studies to argue that Freud's theory of sexuality allowed him to co-opt existing networks of sexologists to transmit psychoanalytic theory. She also claims that psychoanalysis was more successful than other sciences of hysteria precisely because it deployed sexuality to capitalize on these networks. Sadoff concludes that Freud's own historical accounts of the psychoanalytic movement attempted to present psychoanalysis as distinct from the sciences from which it emerged by obscuring the historical importance of his early work on hysteria.

Although Sciences of the Flesh borrows concepts from several critical theorists, it owes its greatest theoretical debt to Bruno Latour's diagnosis of the modern condition as constituted by practices of "translation" and "purification."¹ "Translation" refers to practices that create hybrids of nature and culture, such as the translation of knowledge along scientific networks. "Purification" is the maintenance of the illusion that such hybrids can be easily separated out into their human and nonhuman components. For Latour, modern science constructs very real nature/culture hybrids, such as holes in the ozone layer and the AIDS virus, while modern subjects maintain the illusion that these hybrids can ultimately be purified into "natural" and "cultural," or "real" and "constructed" parts. Of course, psychoanalysis is a component of modernity with which we, its inhabitants, cannot but be familiar. One could imagine several interesting ways to integrate Latour and Freud; Latour is, after all, describing the unconscious of the moderns and suggesting that it is more preoccupied with hybridity and less with sexuality than Freud suggested. Sadoff uses Latour to describe how psychoanalysis and related sciences created nature/culture hybrids or "quasi-objects," such as highly stylized images of female hysterics at the Salpetrière...