Author Description

Psychoanalysis and neurological medicine have promoted contrasting and seemingly irreconcilable notions of the modern self. Since Freud, psychoanalysts have relied on the spoken word in a therapeutic practice that has revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Neurologists and neurosurgeons, meanwhile, have used material apparatus to probe the workings of the nervous system, and in so doing have radically reshaped our understanding of the brainches Both operate in vastly different institutional and cultural contexts. Given these differences, it is remarkable that both fields found resources for their development in the same tradition of late nineteenth-century German medicine: neuropsychiatry. Guenther investigates the significance of this common history.