The threads of psychoanalytic filiations, or: psychoanalysis taking effect

Abstract

Karl Kraus’s pun could well be used in the context of psychoanalysis, too, because the mingling of analysis with kinship is only too clear. A close study of this genealogy and its history will certainly contribute to the historiography of psychoanalysis but, given the enormous impact of psychoanalysis, perhaps also to twentieth century history of science and culture in general. Freud had already drawn the analogy between psychoanalysis and “the effect of X-rays on people who handle them without taking special precautions”. Incidentally, X-rays were discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen in 1895, the year in which Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria were published. And like the radiologists, the pioneer psychoanalysts—and their patients—suffered the side-effects of the newly discovered method. Psychoanalysts and historians might be well advised to take Freud seriously, even when studying him and the one hundred years of the movement he started.

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