From Freud onward, psychoanalytic thinkers have looked to history for insights into the human mind, while historians have been much more ambivalent about the value of psychoanalysis. The interdisciplinary contributions gathered here offer an invaluable survey of this complex and contested field.

Today, a widening range of historical phenomena are being examined through the psychoanalytic lens, while the psychoanalytic tradition itself is coming in for unprecedented historical scrutiny. This collection of essays showcases the innovative, and sometimes contentious, encounters between psychoanalysis and history.

'This rich and interesting collection will provide an essential resource for those wanting to explore creative encounters between psychoanalysis and history.' - Radical Philosophy

"For a century psychoanalysts have carefully listened to their patient's accounts of their past and together have constructed 'a history.' This volume has brilliantly transformed that past into a rich and moving account of psychoanalytical historiography." - Christopher Bollas, psychoanalyst

"The authors of these provocative and wonderfully inviting essays have put psychoanalysis back on the historical agenda: they show the pertinence of psychoanalysis for history writing today and at the same time provide important new historical perspectives on the articulation of psychoanalysis as a method." - Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, UCLA, USA

Autorentext
T. G. Ashplant, Liverpool John Moores University, UK Peter Burke, University of Cambridge, UK John Forrester, University of Cambridge, UK Rhodri Hayward, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Katharine Hodgkin, University of East London, UK Elizabeth Lunbeck, Vanderbilt University, USA Laura Marcus, Oxford University, UK Luisa Passerini, University of Turin, Italy Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and writer Alex Potts, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Lyndal Roper, Oxford University, UK Michael Roper, University of Essex, UK Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan University, USA Pamela Thurschwell, University of Sussex, UK

Inhalt
PART I: FREUD, FREUDIANISM AND HISTORY The Psychoanalytic Corner: Notes on a Conversation with Peter Gay; M.Roth Freud, Fin-de-siècle Politics, and the Making of Psychoanalysis; T.G.Ashplant The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth; E.Lunbeck PART II: PSYCHOANALYTIC PASTS The English Freud: W.H.R. Rivers, Psychotherapy, and the Early Twentieth-century Human Sciences; J.Forrester European Witness: Analysands abroad in the 1920s and 1930s; L.Marcus Beyond Containing: the First World War and the Psychoanalytic Theories of Wilfred Bion; M.Roper 'Primary Maternal Pre-occupation': D.W. Winnicott and Social Democracy in Mid-20th Century Britain; S.Alexander Freud's Stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis; P.Thurschwell PART III: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORICAL SUBJECTIVITIES Historical Subjectivity; B.Taylor Keeping Our Distance; A.Phillips The Seven-Headed Monster: Luther and Psychology; L.Roper Elizabeth Isham's Everlasting Library: Memory and Self in Early Modern Autobiography; K.Hodgkin Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary; A.Potts The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the Making of the British Welfare State; R.Hayward An Eclectic Ego-Histoire; L.Passerini Afterword; P.Burke