‘Psychoanalysis was developed for the treatment of hysteria, an affliction of young women. It has little to offer people with illnesses whose basis is genetic.’

‘That word …’

‘Yes, a horrible word, I agree,’ said Martha. ‘Coined by a Dane, I think. There’s an advance for you! “Inherited”, shall we say?’

‘And “hysteria”? A word coming from the Greek for womb, I think. So: a sort of womb fever.’

‘You’ve done your homework.’

‘It was a long train journey. But do we still think there is such a thing as hysteria? And if so, how can treatments for it be applied to men?’

‘It’s a difficult classification. Men were said to have something called “traumatic hysteria”.’

‘Or they may have fallen off a ladder and cracked their skull. Most of them had, hadn’t they?’

‘I think the intention was to describe a common process. In hysteria, the mind could separate the urges or emotions it didn’t wish to deal with immediately, put them in a sort of mental side room – but unless they were given due consideration at some point, they risked becoming toxic and infecting the whole organism … That was the pathology of hysteria itself. But I think the underlying idea, that things not properly dealt with at the time might eventually turn morbid … That was thought to be a process with a more … universal application.’

‘But a man who was diagnosed with traumatic hysteria following an accident at work wasn’t suffering from the repression of infant sexuality, was he? He’d more probably hurt his head.’

Martha smiled. ‘I don’t need to defend the last detail of the teachings of Freud – or Charcot before him. I don’t belong to a school or a religion.’

‘But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Really? His terrible ambition, his “ego” as he might have termed it, would give him no peace until he’d done for the mind what Euclid had done for geometry or Newton for the laws of motion. And he bent the facts to fit his mission.’

‘I think you’re being a little hard.’

‘He even tried to echo Newton’s phrasing, to make it sound as if he had discovered a natural law. Think of Newton: “Every object attracts every object in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them.” Then Freud: “Every dream act embodies a desire in inverse proportion to the degree of the repression between them.” Or words to that effect. It seems obvious what he was trying to do.’

Martha laughed. ‘I do believe that behind the ambition – which I grant you was large – there was a genuine desire to do good. To heal the sick.’

‘But they weren’t healed, were they? Most of those early patients were epileptic, their spasms caused by some microscopic lesion in the brain. Talking can’t heal that. And the pains of one poor girl were caused not by “hysteria’ but by stomach cancer – of which she died, soon after having been discharged as “cured” of hysteria.’