Review
Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Catastrophes
History of Psychiatry, v 31(1), pp 120-122
01 Mar 2020
Abstract
Current historiographic narrative tends to mark the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s as signalling society’s and mainstream psychiatry’s rejection of psychoanalysis in favour of the supposedly more ‘objective’ biological approaches to psychiatry that now dominate the discipline. Instead, Herzog makes the case that, rather than recede from importance, the late Cold War era should be seen as ‘precisely when psychoanalysis gained the greatest traction, across the West, within medicine and mainstream belief alike’ (p. 1). Instead of a retreat, Herzog argues that psychoanalysis underwent an absorption into society, such that it came ‘to inflect virtually all other thought-systems – from the major religious traditions to the social science disciplines and from conventional advice literature to radical protest movements’ (p. 1). Scholars often miss this transformation of psychoanalysis in western culture and thought, because the actors who took up psychoanalysis after World War II bent and played with its principle tenets in order to accommodate their specific historical needs. By tracing the integration of psychoanalysis into the Catholic Church and among anti-establishment Leftists, for instance, Herzog demonstrates that psychoanalytic concepts continued to shape institutions and movements whose historical trajectories are normally seen as contradictory, incommensurable, or oppositional to each other and to psychoanalytic theory itself. As the author puts it, ‘there was not one Freud circulating in the course of the Cold War era, and not even only a dozen, but rather hundreds (p. 7)’.
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Details
- Title
- Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Catastrophes
- Creators
- Nic John Ramos - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- History of Psychiatry, v 31(1), pp 120-122
- Publisher
- Sage; LONDON
- Number of pages
- 3
- Resource Type
- Review
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000513374300010
- Other Identifier
- 991019170149404721
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- Web of Science research areas
- History Of Social Sciences
- Psychiatry