ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's pre-analytic writings are viewed as constitutive of psychoanalysis, but are also axiomatically claimed as part of the history of psychiatry and, indeed, of the plethora of 'behavioural sciences'. The chapter reveals an oscillation on Freud's part in terms of his relation to hysteria. In order to situate the dilemma of modern psychiatry in relation to hysteria the author examines some of Freud's early writings on the subject. In 'Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralysis' Freud elaborates upon this, and asserts that 'hysteria behaves as though anatomy did not exist or as though it had no knowledge of it'. Psychiatrists were not quite as plentiful in Freud's time as they are now, so the idea that psychiatry might have constituted a fourth impossible profession did not-perhaps-spring immediately to Freud's mind. To resurrect Freud's early writings on hysteria in order to prove something about psychiatry seems like a search for aetiology.
