We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context - the context of other people's opinions, both the popu…

What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice - that is, madness is a dandy theatrical eleme…

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

Tesla has contributed more to electrical science than any man up to his time.

It is always the older that emanates the new one.