Summary:

Heini Hakosalo, Freud & Co. The Mind at the Medical Market in
Fin-de-Siècle Europe    

This paper discusses the emergence of modern psychotherapies during the last decades of the 19th century, and stands as a reminder that Freudian psychoanalysis was only one of many psychoanalytic approaches under construction at the time. The geographical focus of the paper lies in the German-speaking countries. The first part of the paper maps the disciplinary and conceptual terrain on which the new psychotherapies grew. It asks where the patients and the practitioners of these therapies came from and what constituted the conceptual scaffolding of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practices. The second part of the paper discusses some of the forms that the new psychotherapies took during the last decades of the 19th century: suggestotherapy, psychoanalyses, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis was one variant of the analytic branch of psychotherapy, and there was initially little reason to believe that it would win the day. In this sense, the paper will also function as a reminder of the contingency of historical developments.