Freud, Surgery, and the Surgeons

Book excerpt: In this excursion into medical and psychoanalytic history, Paul E. Stepansky charts the rise and fall of the "surgical metaphor"--Freud's view of psychoanalysis as analogous to a surgical procedure. Approaching Freud's understanding of surgery and surgeons historically and biographically, Stepansky draws the reader into the world of late nineteenth-century "heroic surgery," a world into which Sigmund Freud himself was drawn. --From publisher's description