Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves.

Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the depend...