Sometimes a single person is so professionally successful that they become the thing they work on. Call it the Kleenex conundrum or the Dumpster dilemma. Sigmund Freud is so strongly associated with psychoanalysis that it’s easy to forget others had a hand in the creation and development of “the richest systematic description of inner experience that the Western world had produced.”

George Makari (pictured), director of Cornell’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, against the backdrop of Germany before the World War I, describes in Revolution in Mind the historical, cultural, and artistic currents then being bantered about amongst the cognoscenti , and the great historical thinkers who helped Freud develop his theories, starting in particular with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

A Guardian review illustrates the loose borrowing tendencies that make ownership of psychoanalysis’ creation murkier than our id:

Makari shows the ferment of discussion and revision at the Wednesday Psychological Society, the sounding-board for Freud’s theories, which started in 1902 as a small group of colleagues meeting for discussions at his house, and expanded into the huge Vienna Psychoanalytical Society which lasted till the Anschluss in 1938. Here members would offer papers and discuss Freud’s theories, and were liable to be trounced or excommunicated by Freud, only to find later that choice parts of their rejected revisions had been incorporated into his own revised model. Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Georg Groddeck were all followers whom Makari shows Freud rebuffing and then stealing from. “I have a decidedly obliging intellect and am very much inclined toward plagiarism,” he blithely said.

In a discussion that will include philosophy, psychology, and history—as well as a look at Vienna before the war—Makari will talk about his recent work on January 28 at the Y.

In the end, you will be educated enough to blow your nose at those who use “Freudian” as a proprietary eponym, and you can discard the facial tissue in a trash receptacle.