History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past

The relationship between psychoanalysis and history is long-standing, productive and controversial. From Freud onward, psychoanalytic thinkers have looked to history for insights into the operations of the human mind. Historians have been more equivocal about the value of psychoanalysis for their discipline. But recent decades have seen a growing interest in psychoanalysis across the Humanities. History and Psyche brings together some of the best work in this area, in essays by sixteen leading scholars including Lyndal Roper, Michael Roth, Luisa Passerini, Adam Phillips and Peter Burke. Topics explored include Luther and psychobiography, empathy and historical subjectivity, the political history of the Oedipus complex, and childhood in early modernity.

Table of Contents:
PART I: FREUD, FREUDIANISM AND HISTORY The Psychoanalytic Corner: Notes on a Conversation with Peter Gay; M.Roth Freud, Fin-de-siecle 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

About the Author :
Barbara Taylor is a Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. Her publications include Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. with Sarah Knott (2005), On Kindness (co-written with Adam Phillips, 2009). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal. Sally Alexander is an Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths University of London, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a founder editor of History Workshop Journal. Her publications include Becoming a Woman, Essays in 19th and 20thc Feminist History (1995); Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, ed. with Jim Fyrth, (1991; reprint 2008); 'Generational Memory', Oral History Review, October 2009; 'Memory-talk: London Childhoods', in S. Radstone, B. Schwarz eds., Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (2010).

Review :
'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