ABSTRACT
WHY should historians be interested in a psychological monograph on hysteria? When the book is Alan Krohn's Hysteria: The Elusive Neurosis, 1 there are two good reasons. The first is that the book presents a first-rate history, not of hysteria itself (that is done, for example, by Veith in her book, Hysteria2 ) but of recent psychiatric, mainly psychoanalytic, theories about it. Krohn seeks to reestablish the diagnostic usefulness of this most ancient of diseases, the neurosis par excellence for Freud. The origins of psychoanalysis are inextricably caught up with conceptualizations about it and obsessional neurosis. Historians reading Krohn will have a clearer idea of the theoretical setting in which Freud worked and of the vicissitudes of the theory since.
