This exploration of Victorian culture in the United States seeks to destroy the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, the book tells the story of how a widely assorted group of actors compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. The author demonstrates that by the time Freud arrived in America in 1909, psychotherapy was already integrated into American culture and medicine. What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much of which was generated by the medical profession itself. The book examines the interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine, the text argues, ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat - and compete - effecively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace.