(Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) Sally Alexander, Barbara Taylor - History and Psyche - Culture, Psychoanalysis, and The Past-Palgrave Macmillan (2012)

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History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past
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History and Psyche
Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past
Edited by
Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor

HISTORY AND PSYCHE
Copyright © Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, 2012.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I Freud, Freudianism, and History

1 The Psychoanalytic Corner: Notes on a Conversation with
Peter Gay 13
Michael S. Roth
2 Freud, Fin-de-siècle Politics, and the Making of Psychoanalysis 27
T. G. Ashplant
3 The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth 49
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Part II Psychoanalytic Pasts

4 The English Freud: W. H. R. Rivers, Dreaming, and the Making
of the Early Twentieth-Century Human Sciences 71
John Forrester
5 European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s 105
Laura Marcus
6 Beyond Containing: World War I and the Psychoanalytic
Theories of Wilfred Bion 129
Michael Roper
7 Primary Maternal Preoccupation: D. W. Winnicott and Social
Democracy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain 149
Sally Alexander
8 Freud’s Stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis 173
Pamela Thurschwell
v
vi Contents
Part III Psychoanalysis and Historical Subjectivities

9 Historical Subjectivity 195
Barbara Taylor
10 Keeping Our Distance 211
Adam Phillips
11 The Seven-Headed Monster: Luther and Psychology 219
Lyndal Roper
12 Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting Library: Memory and Self in
Early Modern Autobiography 241
Katharine Hodgkin
13 Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary 265
Alex Potts
14 The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the
Making of the British Welfare State 283
Rhodri Hayward
15 An Eclectic Ego-Histoire 305
Luisa Passerini
Afterword 325
Peter Burke
Notes on Contributors 333

Index 337
Acknowledgments
This volume results from the work of the “Psychoanalysis and History”
seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, which
we have convened since 1994 (joined in 2008 by Katharine Hodgkin). The
papers presented at the seminar—some of which appear, in revised form, as
chapters here—have been a constant source of inspiration to us, and we are
grateful to everyone who has participated in the seminar over the years. We
thank too the Institute of Historical Research for hosting the seminar and
the Raphael Samuel History Centre (University of East London/Birkbeck
College University of London/Bishopsgate Institute/Queen Mary University
of London) for co-sponsoring it. Anthony La Vopa and Suzanne Marchand
gave us good advice on the original proposal and invited the book into their
excellent series, for which we thank them. Our thanks also to Paula Rego for
generously allowing us to reproduce one of her artworks on our cover. Our big-
gest debt of course is to the book’s contributors, who have produced wonderful
chapters while putting up with a good deal of editorial pernicketiness—our
warmest thanks to you all!
vii
Introduction
Toward the end of her chapter in this volume (“The Seven-Headed Monster:
Luther and Psychology”), Lyndal Roper asks what is gained by adding a psy-
choanalytic account of subjectivity to the history of the German Reformation.
Can “psychological conflicts, emotions, and unconscious fantasies” be usefully
incorporated into the history of an entire society?1 Behind this question lies
decades of skepticism about the value of psychoanalysis for historical research.
Historians are interested in society and politics, in actions and events, in what
actually happened. Subjectivity, for the skeptic, is refractory; it threatens all
that history stands for; its very fallibility, to paraphrase historian Bill Schwarz,
makes history necessary.2 Yet, as Peter Gay pointed out 30 years ago, every his-
torian works with some concept of human nature.3 Human history is intrin-
sically psychological, even if those who research and write history are often
reluctant to acknowledge this truism.4
One aim in producing this book is simply to remind its readers of the omni-
presence of subjectivity in the historical sources. Martin Luther’s personality
was always regarded—by his contemporaries and subsequent generations—as
the “strongest proof” of the holiness of his thought. Leonardo da Vinci’s pos-
sible homosexuality (the theme of Elizabeth Lunbeck’s chapter) was a source
of scandal in his lifetime and has fascinated commentators, including Freud,
ever since. Freud was convinced that the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile was
prompted by Leonardo’s unconscious fantasies of maternal seductiveness.
Whether or not he was right in this, history in the wake of Freud shows many
artists who, like the American painter Jackson Pollock, discussed here by Alex
Potts, attributed their creativity to the “energy” of “inner forces.” (Pollock
believed that paint dripping on canvas took on something of the composi-
tion of the unconscious.) Like artistic creativity, ideational creativity also runs
deep, as Michael Roper shows in the case of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred
Bion whose traumatic experiences as a tank commander during World War I
shaped his later concept of psychotic anxiety. After the war, psychic trauma
entered the political sphere, as welfare policymakers across Europe took up
ideas about war neurosis and integrated them into new discourses of mental
1
2 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
suffering, which, as Rhodri Hayward and Sally Alexander differently demon-

strate, underpinned the nascent welfare state in Britain.
As all these chapters so clearly show, human drives, wishes, fears—conscious
and unconscious—are the stuff of history. Historians do not psychoanalyze
people of the past; rather, they work in the archives, with the residues of the
dead whose voices remain silent until they re-sound in the mind of the his-
torian.5 Historians explore the many ways that the past survives within the
present—as institutions, myths, habits of thought or silences; they show how
that which has been forgotten may yet influence some of the most recalci-
trant problems of an age. Individuals make history in particular times and
places, but many of the deeper impulses that motivate people are discernible
throughout history, in the “importunities of the pleasure principle,” in Peter
Gay’s phrase, as these exigencies manifest themselves in human ideas and
behaviors. The “most fundamental insight” that psychoanalysis brings to the
historian, Gay wrote back in 1985—in a statement that beautifully sums up
the issues explored in this book—is that “the wish, the emotion and the fan-
tasy are as important as the act in man’s experience.”6
History and Psyche is a product of the “Psychoanalysis and History
Seminar,” which has met regularly at the Institute of Historical Research in
central London for nearly two decades. The book is edited by the seminar’s
convenors, and nearly all of its contributors have presented papers there
(some of which appear as chapters here). These origins in part explain the
strong presence of “British School” psychoanalysis in the volume. British
School psychoanalysis, or “object relations analysis” as it is also known,
is a portmanteau term for the analytic tradition stemming from the work
of the Austrian-born London analyst Melanie Klein; its leading figures
include Ronald Fairbairn, John Bowlby, and—more equivocally—Donald
Winnicott, the psychoanalyst whose work is the focus of Sally Alexander’s
chapter. Other leading psychoanalysts—especially Freud himself, and the
first generation of Freudians—are also discussed here, but it is the British
tradition, whose influence has grown significantly in recent years, across
the Anglophone world but also in parts of Europe and South America, which
receives the most attention. As Alexander, Hayward, Forrester and other
contributors show, psychoanalytic ideas in twentieth-century Britain owed
much to Vienna but also to debates in the social sciences, especially anthro-
pology, and to native brands of psychiatry and paediatrics as well as to new
forms of welfare provision. Military psychiatry, workmen’s compensation
hearings, and public health services, especially clinics for mothers and chil-
dren, were settings for the “talking cure” in new and innovative forms.
This book also has British political roots. The “Psychoanalysis and History
Seminar” grew out of an earlier series of public discussions about the rela-
tionship between psychoanalysis and history held in London in 1985 and
1986 under the aegis of the History Workshop Centre for Social History. This
centre, which is now defunct, was one of a multitude of initiatives under-
taken by “History Workshop,” a movement for the democratization of histori-
cal enquiry, which flourished in Britain and elsewhere from the late 1960s
Introduction 3
to the late 1980s.7 History Workshop was a dynamic mix of historical ideas
and approaches; its sponsorship of psychoanalytic perspectives reflected this
catholicity but also the specific character of late twentieth-century radical-
ism, which embraced psychic change as integral to its transformative social
vision. The link between radicalism and psychology was hardly new in the
1960s, but it was this generation of the New Left—with its sexual utopian-
ism, antifamilial ethos, and hostility to conventional distinctions between
the mad and the sane—that put “psycho-politics” at the center of dissen-
tient culture.8 The emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement at the
end of the decade heightened political interest in issues of personal life and
sexual-familial power. Feminist attitudes to psychoanalysis were ambivalent
at best, especially in the United States where the dominant school of psychoa-
nalysis, ego-psychology, had embedded itself in cultural life with conservative
effects. Some feminist historians (including the editors of this volume), how-
ever, were inspired by Freudian ideas and made use of them in their research.
For Luisa Passerini, for example, whose ego-histoire we publish in this book,
the excitement of discovering psychoanalytic ideas was inseparable from the
political fervor of the mid-1960s when, as a young activist, she became con-
vinced “that the present situation of the world, and strategies to change it,
had to be understood at both a social and individual level, incorporating the
public and the private, the political and the personal: adopting a Marxian
analysis for the dynamics of material production and a Freudian one for the
dialectics of the libido and the psyche.”9 Taking courage from Juliet Mitchell’s
seminal Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), Passerini and her friends began to
explore the “body/psyche connection” and to challenge male-oriented psy-
chologies. As Passerini describes her uses of Freud, Jung, and Lacan in her
work on Italian fascism, the politics of 1968, and love in modern European
history, the reader follows some of the combined fortunes of psychoanalysis
and radical ideals from the mid-twentieth century to the present.
Professional historians were variably affected by these developments.
In Britain, the political winds that blew psychoanalytic ideas into history
workshops and feminist forums in the 1960s and 1970s penetrated few his-
tory departments. Imbued with the conventions of positivist history, with
its emphases on empirical evidence and objectivity, most historians dis-
missed psychoanalysis out of hand, with even leftwing historians such as
the influential Communist Party Historians Group proving mostly hostile or
indifferent.10 However, historians in other European countries were making
“significant forays into the psychoanalytic terrain,”11 while among American
historians a psychoanalytic subdiscipline—“psychohistory”—flowered for a
time before withering under a barrage of criticism. The psychohistory episode
in the American historical academy—which had its breakthrough moment in
1957, with William Langer’s presidential address to the American Historical
Association describing psychoanalysis as the “new frontier” in history, and
continued to progress strongly throughout the 1960s and 1970s before peter-
ing out in the 1980s—is a story that remains to be told, partly, no doubt,
because the verdict on it has been so unremittingly negative, with even such
staunchly psychoanalytic scholars as Peter Gay condemning psychohistory

for its “pressure toward reductionism, its often barbarous language, its cava-
lier way with the evidence.”12 But this, as Peter Burke shows in the afterword,
is too dismissive. Certainly a good deal of American psychohistory managed
to be simultaneously wildly speculative and drearily mechanistic, yet there
were also some highly original and compelling works, including Norman
O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) and Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther
(1958), both discussed here by Lyndal Roper.13
One of the strongest objections to psychohistory lay in its application to
historical subjects of interpretive schema developed for clinical psychoanaly-
sis (“psychoanalyzing the dead”). “With regard to people of past times,” Freud
wrote to Lytton Strachey in 1928, “we are in the same position as with dreams
to which we have been given no associations—and only a layman could
expect us to interpret these.”14 At the time he wrote this, Freud had already
published his Leonardo biography, analyzed here by Elizabeth Lunbeck, and
would go on to write Moses and Monotheism, discussed by Michael Roth; but
his misgivings retain their force. People leave behind many traces and clues
to their mental states, but these only become accessible to the historian when
they achieve some form of cultural expression. It is not (except in the case of
oral history) the emotions or fantasies of historical subjects that come before
the historian, but their manifestations in language, art, and cultural artifacts
of all kinds.15 The psychohistory of old was strikingly insensitive to issues of
representation and form, treating written works, for example, as direct reflec-
tions of their authors’ inner states without regard to literary genre or linguistic
traditions. With the “linguistic turn” taken by history in the last quarter of
the twentieth century, this interpretative naïveté gave way to a much more
sophisticated approach, which, as we discuss further later on, has had complex
implications for the psychoanalysis-history relationship.
Psychohistory may have been bold, not to say extravagant, in its explana-
tory claims, but (like the American psychoanalytic establishment in general)
it also tended toward cultural conservativism, not least in its attitude to
women and sexual identities. In this at least it conformed to mainstream his-
tory. But times were changing; soon even mainstream waters were churning.
The elections of Thatcher and Regan; the breakup of the Soviet bloc; ethnic
conflicts and the emergence of new nationalisms; the rise of religious fun-
damentalisms: these and other seismic developments shook long-standing
assumptions about past and present, forcing historians to look for new types of
explanations.16 From the late 1970s onward historians found themselves swept
up in debates about the politics of history and the philosophical foundations
of their discipline—debates that brought subjectivity to the fore of historical
consciousness, but in very different ways than previously. In an era of ascend-
ant neoliberalism, the vision of a liberated subjectivity that had fired histori-
cal imaginations in the preceding decades was replaced by a growing concern
with the constraints on subjectivity, its historic molding by deep structures of
power embedded in cultural life, especially in language and communicative
practices (discourse). The rise of new radicalisms based around specific social
Introduction 5
identities (women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities) brought fresh voices into

the conversation, which exposed dominant notions of human nature as par-
tial and power-driven, and called for historical investigations into cultural/
discursive constructions of selfhood. Feminist historians took the lead, with
pathbreaking work on gender difference as a historico-cultural artifact rather
than a biological fact: a theoretical innovation so significant, according to
one leading cultural historian, that it “transformed the ground of thinking
about history” across much of the discipline.17
For the psychoanalytically minded, these changes brought mixed results. A
culturally constructed subjectivity, of the kind that eventually came to domi-
nate the humanities (and still does so today), was not necessarily inimical to
unconscious fantasy, yet it was often articulated in antipsychoanalytic terms.
There were some sound political reasons for this: for much of its history,
psychoanalysis has dealt badly with issues of power and inequality, often
reproducing prejudicial stereotypes—of women, gays, “primitive peoples”—
dressed up as scientific naturalism. Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis as a
normalizing discipline, an instrument of psychocultural domination, thus
found a ready audience among the radically minded, especially among gender
theorists for whom rejection of Freudian ideas about femininity and homo-
sexuality often segued into a repudiation of psychoanalytic ideas tout court.18
Subjectivity as an inner realm of desire and fantasy became tarred with the
brush of a retrograde “essentialism.”19 Meanwhile, however, a growing number
of cultural historians (and new-historicist literary scholars, with the bounda-
ries between the two disciplines becoming increasingly porous) were turning
to issues of intimate life and emotional experience. For some, this new focus
on “affect” represented another twist in the linguistic turn as they sought
to demonstrate that changes in affective states were attributable to chang-
ing discursive practices. The idea was not entirely novel—“There are people,”
Rochefoucauld opined in the seventeenth century, “who would never have
been in love if they had never heard tell of love”20 —but now it became, as it
remains, a very influential position, well represented in this volume by Rhodri
Hayward’s “The Pursuit of Serenity.” Hayward uses evidence from worker
compensation schemes and other welfare measures in mid-twentieth-century
Britain to show how policy changes designed to deal with emotional ailments
associated with modernity—stress, anxiety—actually produced the mental
states that they set out to alleviate. “The distinctiveness of these schemes,”
Hayward writes, “demonstrates the transience of the psychological categories
used to ground such interventions, and, perhaps more interestingly, it suggests
that the psyche itself may be continually reconstituted as modes of production
and social organization change.”21
But while many historians enthusiastically embraced such construction-
ist perspectives, others turned to psychoanalysis for insights. These complex
developments—discussed in Barbara Taylor’s chapter on historical subjectiv-
ity and in Kate Hodgkin’s chapter on early-modern autobiography—generated
a set of arguments around the psychoanalysis-history relationship, which are
still being debated, and whose echoes can be heard throughout this volume.
The “Psychoanalysis and History” seminar was launched amid these debates.
In tune with the intellectual mood of the times, it was, and remains, strongly
interdisciplinary. One of the main foci of its work has been the history of the
psychoanalytic tradition itself. Like all schools of thought, psychoanalysis has
its promotional side; in-house histories tend to present its development as a
heroic march of “truth” against “error.”22 Running alongside this celebratory
literature however is a wide-ranging and critical historiography, which treats
psychoanalytic ideas as historical products rather than transcendent verities,
and does not blink at exposing the weaknesses—the prejudices, pusillanimi-
ties, rivalries—that have shaped the tradition as much as its intellectual daring
and reformist courage.23 A leading theme in this historiography has been the
relationship between politics and psychoanalysis from Freud onward—here
explored in different ways by T. G. Ashplant, Michael Roth, Laura Marcus,
Sally Alexander, and Rhodri Hayward.
In 1973 the intellectual historian Carl Schorske published an influential arti-
cle arguing that Freud’s turn to the psyche in the 1890s represented a retreat
from the political conflicts of fin-de-siècle Austria, and in particular from the
vicious anti-Semitism that was then coming to dominate Austrian political
life.24 The argument, revisited here by Ashplant, was controversial (Peter Gay,
as Michael Roth notes in his chapter, strongly rejected it25) but the questions
it raised, about the political influences on Freudian thought, have since found
echoes in a host of studies exploring the politics of psychoanalysis, from its
collisions (and, in the case of Nazi Germany, collusions26) with anti-Semitism
and fascism, to its embroilment in welfarism and social democratic politics,
examined here by Hayward and Alexander, to its complex and often fractious
relationship with radicalisms from socialism and anticolonialism to feminism
and queer politics. For individuals, the interplay between politics and psy-
choanalysis could sometimes take on a deeply personal aspect, as it did for
the imagist poet H.D., discussed here by Laura Marcus, who found herself tus-
sling with her inner demons while lying on the couch in Freud’s consulting
room as the street below became covered in Nazi insignia; and for W. H. R.
Rivers, the “English Freud,” whose self-analysis, as John Forrester shows here,
was suffused with the politics of World War I; and, much more recently, for
Michael Roth, whose chapter opens with an account of a sharp personal les-
son in psychoanalysis’s ongoing ability to arouse political controversy. In the
mid-1990s Roth agreed to curate a Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress
in Washington. Congress at the time was dominated by Republicans deeply
hostile to such cultural events, and the library came under great pressure to
cancel the exhibition until Peter Gay, among other influential figures, rode
to the rescue. Writing about Gay some 15 years after this episode, Roth por-
trays him as a man deeply committed to Enlightenment values, a Voltairean
intellectual for whom Freud incarnated the spirit of enlightened liberalism: a
reading of Freud that Roth disputes, while at the same time writing with deep
admiration of Gay’s seminal contribution to psychoanalytic history.
Gay’s Freud for Historians, a veritable manifesto for psychoanalytical his-
tory, arrived on the history scene nearly two decades ago. Gay’s professional
Introduction 7
eminence ensured it a respectful reception, yet the challenges it posed to

historians remain current. For Gay, psychoanalysis was an orientation to his-
tory rather than a speciality in its own right, and thus fully compatible with
traditional historical genres.27 But against this ecumenicalism, many histo-
rians at the time, and many still today, argued that psychoanalysis is inher-
ently antihistorical; as Rhodri Hayward puts it in chapter fourteen, “[T]he
real essence of the self [in psychoanalytic theory] is located outside history”
in “the romantic sublime of the deep unconscious, which is said to resist the
claims of social determinism.”28 If so, this would preclude the sort of “frater-
nal” collaboration between history and psychoanalysis that Gay envisaged;
but is it the case? Certainly it is true that subjectivity on the psychoanalytic
model involves processes that lie outside history, in the psychodynamics of
the human mind. Yet at the same time psychoanalysis is all about history,
about the grip that the past exerts on individuals and societies and the diffi-
culties people have in allowing it to become truly historic instead of doggedly
repeating it in the present.29 Schools of psychoanalysis hold divergent views
about the influence of history (“real events”) on psychic life, but the interplay
between past and present is a core issue for all psychoanalytic thinkers.30
Moreover, while the processes that govern psychic functioning (repression,
negation, identification, projection, etc.) may be transhistorical, psychic con-
tents are not: the wishes, anxieties, fantasies that populate people’s minds
have an important historical component.31 Dreams—Freud’s “royal road to
the unconscious”—are a product of “dreamwork” (the processes that trans-
form unconscious fantasies and emotions into dream narratives) but they
are also historical and cultural phenomena, subjective manifestations of
particular cultural worlds.32 Likewise psychotic delusions, which are to be
found plaguing some people in all periods but whose contents vary greatly
with their cultural (especially religious) settings;33 and of course memory,
which “dramatises and recreates the past,”34 turning history into the stuff of
subjectivity.
And if mental life is, in part, historically contingent, states of mind in turn
shape history in ways that we ignore at our peril. To take two examples from
this volume: the forces arraigned against Freud and his fellow Jews in 1930s
Austria were military/political but they were fed by conscious and unconscious
passions so overwhelmingly destructive that history still struggles to come to
terms with them. The intellectual revolution effected by Martin Luther was
played out at a theological level, but it took its momentum, Lyndal Roper tells
us, from an “interplay of sexual anxieties and psychic investments” among
his followers. These psychoanalytically informed explanations are not dis-
pensable add-ons to dominant historical narratives, they are vital to our com-
prehension of these complex historical phenomena. Psychoanalysis is not the
key to all lived experience. People are idiosyncratic; history and psyche mold
individuals, but in ways that no history or general psychology can ever fully
account for. The insights that psychoanalysis yields into past minds are hypo-
thetical and provisional, as indeed are all historical interpretations. The mys-
teries of the psyche will always exceed the historian’s imaginative reach. But
as long as human history is being written, present-day minds will strive to

comprehend past minds. As this volume shows, psychoanalysis is an invalu-
able aid to that endeavor.
Notes
1. See chapter eleven, p. 235, in this volume.
2. Bill Schwarz, “Braudel and Historical Time,” paper delivered at Goldsmiths University
of London, October 2003.
3. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6.
4. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1954), 194.
5. Carolyn Steedman’s Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) gives a very
subtle account of the archival experience.
6. Gay, Freud for Historians, 173.
7. Raphael Samuel, ed., History Workshop, A Collectanea 1967–1991 (Oxford: History
Workshop, 1991); for further information, see www.raphael-samuel.org.uk. The journal
History Workshop Journal (HWJ ), which grew out of the History Workshop movement,
is still going strong (this book’s editors are both editors of HWJ ); it carries many arti-
cles exploring the psychoanalysis-history connection (see especially issue 26 [autumn
1988], for a feature on psychoanalysis and history; issues 48 and 49 [autumn 1999 and
spring 2000] for a two-part feature on the history of dreams; and issue 57 [spring 2004]
for a feature on the historical imagination).
8. Autobiographical writings by radicals of the period are the best source for this; for the
British case, see, inter alia, Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream. Remembering the
Sixties (London: Verso, 2000); Lynne Segal, Making Trouble. Life and Politics (London:
Serpents Tail, 2007); Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years. An Autobiography of the Sixties
(London: Verso, 1987). The “Dialectics of Liberation Conference,” held in London in
1967, was organized by the antipsychiatry movement; its speakers included Stokeley
Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, and R. D. Laing.
9. See chapter fifteen, p. 305, in this volume.
10. Daniel Pick, “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture,” in David Feldman and
Jon Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 210–236.
11. Ibid., 210. Peter Burke gives a very informative account of this in the afterword.
12. Gay, Freud for Historians, 17. In 2003 Bruce Mazlish, one of the key figures in American
psychohistory, noted the lack of any historical overview of the field, and offered a per-
sonal account of its successes and failings. See Bruce Mazlish, “The Past and Future of
Psychohistory,” The Annual of Psychoanalysis 31 (2003), 251–262. For a brief, thoughtful
account of the rise and fall of psychohistory, see T. G. Ashplant, “Psychoanalysis in
Historical Writing,” History Workshop Journal 26 (1988), 102–119.
13. Peter Burke’s afterword to this volume offers an excellent account of the development
of psychoanalytic history from its “pioneer” years in the early twentieth century to the
present day.
Some of the most influential studies employing psychoanalytic theory, by histo-
rians on both sides of the Atlantic, have been in witchcraft history: see in particular
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern
Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); and her Witch Craze. Terror and Fantasy in Baroque
Germany (London: Yale University Press, 2004); also John Demos, Entertaining Satan:
Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982);
Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History:
Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996); Robin
Introduction 9
Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Contexts of European Witchcraft
(London: HarperCollins, 1996).
While psychohistory met with little enthusiasm in the British history establishment
of the 1960s and 1970s, there were a few well-known British historians, such as Keith
Thomas, who made use of psychoanalytic concepts; and in 1970 Bruce Mazlish was
invited to deliver a lecture to the Royal Historical Society (“What is Psychohistory?,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, vol. 21 [1971], 79–99).
14. Perry Meisel and Walter M. Kendrick, Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix
Strachey, 1924–1925 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985), 332–333.
15. Jean Starobinksi, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14 (1966), 81.
16. E. J. Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books, December 16,
1993, 62–64. For the relationship between politics and changes in historiography, see
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005), 187, 190, and throughout.
17. Eley, Crooked Line, 126.
18. For Foucault’s complicatedly hostile attitude to psychoanalysis, see John Forrester, The
Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 286–316;
Joel Whitebrook, “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis,” in Gary
Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 312–347.
19. See chapter nine in this volume. For a thoughtful account of the impact of these
changes on the history trade written by a leading historian sympathetic to psychoana-
lytical history, see Lynn Hunt, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” in
Lloyd Cramer and Sara Mazah, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), 337–356; see also Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in
Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 1–32.
20. Starobinski, “Nostalgia,” 82.
21. See chapter fourteen, p. 284, in this volume.
22. For a sampling of this, see the introduction to Peter Kutter, ed., Psychoanalysis International:
A Guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the World, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog,
1992). Kutter was incoming president of the International Psychoanalytic Association;
his introduction celebrated the triumphant global progress of psychoanalysis, includ-
ing into the former Soviet bloc: “It is comforting to know that such small countries as
Lithuania, scarcely liberated from the yoke of political tutelage, have opened up to psy-
choanalysis and see in it a way of developing themselves as individuals and a society in
freedom” (xiv).
23. The literature is large and growing rapidly; two recent important works are Eli Zaretsky,
Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A
Knopf, 2004); and George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
24. Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American
Historical Review 78.2 (1973), 328–347, reprinted in Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna,
Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 181–207.
25. See chapter one, p. 18, in this volume.
26. For the depressing story of the collaborationist policies of German psychoanalytic insti-
tutions during the Nazi period, see Stephen Frosh, “Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish
Science,’” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84.5 (2003), 1315–1332.
27. Gay, Freud for Historians, 210.
28. See chapter fourteen, p. 283, in this volume.
29. Adam Phillips, “Close-Ups,” History Workshop Journal 57 (spring 2004), 142. As this essay
shows, some of the most thoughtful reflections on the historical enterprise have come
from psychoanalysts: see Phillips’s chapter in this volume, and also Christopher Bollas,
“The Functions of History,” in his Cracking Up. The Work of Unconscious Experience (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 103–145.
30. Alex Holder, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and the Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents
(London: H Karnac Books Ltd, 2005), 77–78; Jonathan Sklar, Landscapes of the Dark:
History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis (London: H Karnac Books Ltd, 2011).
31. For an interesting defense of the historicity of the psyche by the son of a well-known
psychoanalyst, see Thomas Kohut, “Psychoanalysis as Psychohistory; or Why
Psychotherapists Cannot Afford to Ignore Culture,” The Annual of Psychoanalysis 31
(2003), 225–236.
32. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper, eds., Dreams and History, the Interpretation of Dreams from
Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004).
33. Katharine Hodgkin, Madness in Seventeenth Century Autobiography (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
34. Sally Alexander, “Memory Talk: London Childhoods,” in Susannah Radstone and Bill
Schwarz, eds., Memory: History, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press),
236.
Part I
Freud, Freudianism, and History
1
The Psychoanalytic Corner: Notes
on a Conversation with Peter Gay
Michael S. Roth
Probably it will always be a kind of corner, psychoanalysis and history.

But . . . a little larger would be nice, a larger corner.
—Peter Gay, 2009
In the autumn of 2009 I made my way to the New York apartment of Peter Gay,
where he and I spent the afternoon talking about psychoanalysis and history.
Peter will need little introduction to readers of this volume. His achievements
as a historian are well-known, from his early work on the Enlightenment, to
his multivolume study of bourgeois culture, to his recent survey of European
modernism.1 He has been prolific, and his interests wide-ranging, includ-
ing years during the 1980s training as a research analyst at the Western
New England Psychoanalytic Institute in New Haven. His 1988 biography
of Sigmund Freud, A Life for Our Time, stands out even among his various
writings on psychoanalysis.2 Having early on rejected “psychohistory,” Peter
developed what he described as a social history of ideas informed by psycho-
analytic concepts. His historical writings consistently return to themes such
as sexuality, aggression, repression, and self-understanding (or self-delusion).
His biography of Freud portrays a thinker deeply indebted to the universal val-
ues of Enlightenment, rather than the specific circumstances of fin-de-siécle
Vienna. Psychoanalytic and historical themes have been continually inter-
twined in his essays and books.
I hadn’t spoken to Peter in some years, since he served on an advisory com-
mittee for Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, an exhibition that I curated for
the Library of Congress (LOC) in the 1990s.3 Even in its planning stages the
exhibition aroused controversy, especially so after the gossipy magazine Lingua
Franca ran an amusing article about how Freud critics and defenders were
struggling over the themes in the show.4 I was cast as therapist to this messy
process—curating as the “impossible profession.” Once the Washington Post
13
14 Michael S. Roth
and the New York Times ran stories about the controversies, the LOC became
increasingly nervous.5 This was 1995, and the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC had already taken a beating because of what seemed to many
a balanced (read: “insufficiently patriotic”) exhibition on the Enola Gay—the
plane that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Republican Party
had gained control of Congress, and the budgets for cultural institutions were
threatened. Indeed, in a right-wing effort to push through draconian budget
cuts, the entire government was shut down, which meant that no one on the
Federal payroll was reporting to work. I would meet with LOC officials in cafés,
since the offices were officially closed. When the LOC announced it was post-
poning (indefinitely) the Freud exhibition, its officials probably thought they
were choosing the path of least resistance. However, the decision to postpone
only sparked more controversy, as many rushed to defend the creation of an
historical exhibition on the cultural importance of Sigmund Freud, whatever
the contemporary judgments concerning the scientific validity of his theories.
Peter Gay, despite our differences in regard to many aspects of Freud’s legacy,
was one of those who came to the exhibition’s rescue.
Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture eventually opened in Washington and
traveled around the world, and the show proved to be popular with audiences
and most critics. I was grateful for the support of historians like Peter, and I
particularly remember a letter he wrote to James Billington, the Librarian of
Congress. Peter knew that many government officials working on cultural
issues were running scared—as were institutions all over the country that
received public funding. He asked the nation’s librarian if he wanted to be
remembered as a scholar devoted to free speech, or as an official devoted to
preserving bureaucratic peace. Billington allowed us to proceed, and I am
convinced that letters from Peter and other prominent historians and public
intellectuals helped a great deal.
As I made my way to Peter’s home, not far from Columbia University (where
his teaching career began), I wondered how this senior historian was taking
to his “retirement.” I found him surrounded by books and papers, deep into a
new book on Romanticism and with further projects in view. Our discussions
wandered between the professional and the personal, returning persistently
to certain themes that I have tried to bring out here. Reading over the tran-
scripts later, however, we decided that they could not be published as they
were. Instead, at the suggestion of the editors of this volume, I have put down
some of my own thoughts on the relationship between psychoanalysis and
history, taking my discussions with Peter as a point of reference. I doubt that
Peter will agree with all my remarks, but I hope he will be pleased that our
conversation has given rise to them.
* * *
A central theme of our dialogue was the importance of Enlightenment to

psychoanalytic thought. To Peter Gay, Freud is a legatee of the Enlightenment
tradition. As a historian, Gay cut his intellectual teeth on a defense of
The Psychoanalytic Corner 15
Enlightenment, showing how the rational, anticlerical position of the “party

of Voltaire” contained much that continued to drive modern thinking in suc-
ceeding centuries. Talking to me, he returned to Freud’s “aggressive atheism”
as evidence of the psychoanalytic continuation of the Voltairean tradition.
Freudianism, he insisted, was a further expression of the Enlightenment bat-
tle to stamp out hypocrisy, puncture illusions, and generally écrasez l'infâme.
In A Life for Our Time he wrote of Freud’s ‘indelible debt to the thought of
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, its critical spirit and its hope for
humanity.”6
Freud’s polemical writings against religion are key texts for this Voltairean
reading of the psychoanalytic project. The Future of an Illusion is one of Freud’s
many efforts at demystification in the tradition of the philosophes, attacking
religion for appealing to infantile desires while obscuring the true sources
of human suffering. In Civilization and its Discontents, which continued this
train of thought in describing the infantile satisfactions of the “oceanic feel-
ing,” Freud cited Voltaire’s advice at the end of Candide to cultivate one’s
garden. However he adduced the philosophe there, not to debunk faith, but to
lend intellectual weight to the recognition that “life . . . is too hard for us; it
brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to
bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.”7 Cultivating one’s gar-
den, Freud suggested, is such a measure, as is religion. But so, too, he argues,
is science: “scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too.”8
Here emerged a difference—between Gay’s and my understanding of
Freud’s relationship to the Enlightenment—which cropped up repeatedly
during our conversation. Whereas Gay insists on a “very clear” distinction
in Freud between science and religion, I would want to emphasize the more
skeptical tenor of Freud’s thought tout court. Freud’s skepticism about religion
doubles back into skepticism about critical atheism as well. For Freud, there is
no neutral, no epistemologically pure, place from which to demystify another
mode of thought. The scientific attitude, the anticlerical perspective, is also
a “deflection” from the pains and disappointments of life. Although Freud
certainly thought that science was more effective than religion in helping
people to comprehend and manage the vicissitudes of life, he did not regard
it as a wholly rational enterprise, floating above the messy conflict of human
desires. In other words, there are many ways to cultivate one’s garden, but
none of them allow you to keep your hands clean.
Freud’s Enlightenment did not aspire to conquer human passions through
the forces of Reason; rather, the passions are perceived by him as the fuel of
reason. Freud quoted Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau on
three separate occasions: “If the little savage were left to himself, preserving
all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the
violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with
his mother.”9 A grown man’s passion does not disappear because ignorance
is replaced by knowledge, but the force of that passion can be “deflected”
so that it becomes less “savage.” Freud shared Diderot’s view that only the
passions can inspire greatness, and that they are also the source of our most
16 Michael S. Roth
intense pleasures. Freud’s Enlightenment, in other words, was not a dream of

perfect lucidity, of total mastery of the irrational. This goal of social and indi-
vidual perfection is the target of some of the sharpest criticisms in Civilization
and its Discontents. Freud calls the “psychological premises” on which com-
munism is based an “untenable illusion,” and he dismisses “natural ethics”
as offering only “the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself
better than others.”10 Freud recognized that this kind of utopianism was a
type of domination, an instance of what Horkheimer and Adorno would call
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment a “triumphant calamity.”11
Freud’s militant atheism and modest view of Enlightenment progress put
him, from Gay’s perspective, firmly in the trajectory of modern liberalism.
Gay’s Freud is less the conquistador than the man who sagely chooses the
middle way between a defense of the status quo and the revolutionary project
to overturn it. This Freud has some unpleasant truths to relate but, like his
hero Darwin, the psychoanalyst believes that people can eventually assimi-
late these truths without completely altering their way of life. Gay’s Freud
resembles many middle-class liberals buffeted by political and social forces
difficult to control, steering a course that manages to avoid extremism while
maintaining an extraordinary level of realism and productivity.
Peter Gay and I returned to these themes throughout our conversation,
and I remarked on my own resistance to the notion of Freud as a liberal
thinker. In my early work on Freud in Psycho-Analysis as History (1987) I had
emphasized the importance of conflict and contradiction for psychoanalysis:
“Transference, then, is the radical facet of Freud’s theory because it reveals
the contradictions . . . that can lead people to make fundamental changes in
the way we live together. Although it does not compel such changes, transfer-
ence makes possible an understanding of the some of the roots of the crisis
of our civilization.”12 I saw Freud then, and still see him now, as a dialectical
thinker for whom an acknowledgment of conflict opened up the possibility
for radical change rather than just compromise. Why, I wondered, would one
make the effort to go back to the unconscious and to expose the disorders of
human desire, if all one wanted was a middle way? Freud’s recognition of the
fierce conflicts within the psyche, and between the drives propelling indi-
viduals and the demands of society, is effectively erased if one perceives him
only as an agent of progress through compromise. Psychoanalysis exposes the
costs of compromise. Efforts to place Freud within the framework of bourgeois
liberalism—so common within American psychoanalysis—run the danger of
reducing the edgy import of much of his thought, domesticating it within an
ideology of adaptation.
Having said this, I should emphasize that Peter Gay’s version of liberal-
ism is more expansive and challenging than the blandly accommodationist
variety dominating American psychoanalysis. In his writings, especially in
his multivolume history of the middle class, Gay has consistently tested and
broadened our notions of bourgeois convention. Indeed, much of his schol-
arly work has assimilated diverse “contradictory” elements into a complex
historical narrative in which liberal intellectuals were challenged to achieve
mastery through assimilation. As Robert Dieter and Mark Micale comment

in the introduction to their excellent edited collection of essays in honor of
Gay’s work:
[T]he drive for mastery emerges from his [Gay’s] work like the figure in the
carpet. To Gay, the European Enlightenment, the rise of modernity, and
the discovery of psychoanalysis all represent recoveries of nerve, histori-
cally specific refusals to submit passively to forces that seemed uncontrol-
lable . . . in his biography of Freud . . . he represents Freud’s life as a lifelong
and largely successful quest for self-mastery.13
For me, however, mastery through assimilation is also a description of coop-

tation, what Robert Novick called “rejection through partial incorporation.”14
Self-mastery can be a form of repression that psychoanalysis should allow us
to recognize so that we might explore alternative possibilities for change.
* * *
Peter Gay had already published an impressive body of work when he began
to write more regularly on Freud in the 1980s. At the time he took what
we might call a moderate position among those who were looking at his-
tory through a psychoanalytic lens, or at psychoanalysis through a histori-
cal lens. Among the former were some—mostly writers working within the
traditions of critical theory and deconstruction—who saw Freud as a figure
who continued the critique of reason and objectivity, the third of the “mas-
ters of suspicion” who, like Marx and Nietzsche before him, exposed the
lies and self-serving fantasies of bourgeois culture. Among the latter were
those—mostly writers of critical biographical studies or skeptical historians
of science—who used historical research to debunk Freud’s achievements,
interpreting them as merely an expression of his own warped experiences,
based on a manipulation of evidence and people. In contrast to both of these
camps, Gay wanted to bring psychoanalytic concepts into historical work
without attempting to put the past on the couch. “A reliance on psychoa-
nalysis, after all, need not entail a naïve reductionist, monocausal theory of
history.”15 He wanted, that is, to pay attention to unconscious factors while
using an approach that would be “heavily invested in reality.”16 Borrowing a
phrase from Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Gay wrote: “[T]he ‘historical and psy-
chological in one’: this states my program with admirable economy.”17
The “program” resulted in Freud for Historians, which steered a course
between those psychohistorians who thought Freud provided all the keys
for unlocking the mysteries of the past and critics who rejected any theory
of psychological “preconditions” as antihistorical. Gay deplored the reduc-
tionist tendencies of the first group and the know-nothing attitudes of the
second. For him, psychoanalysis, like historical inquiry generally, depended
on a healthy respect for the complexities of human interaction, and people’s
capacities for concealing their motivations from themselves as well as others.
18 Michael S. Roth
Like the analyst, the historian’s task, he argued, is to use evidence to make
sense of these hidden elements in human life.
Although Gay could be eloquent in describing the overlapping interests of
historians and analysts in deciphering opaque clues from the past, he was
more sharply polemical in denouncing those who wanted to confine the rel-
evance of Freud’s ideas to a small subsection of Viennese society at the end of
the nineteenth century. He denounced the “myth” that all of the founder’s
patients were from the same bourgeois, Jewish sector of the capitol of the
Hapsburg Empire, noting the surprising variety of patient backgrounds in the
case studies.18 He insisted that Vienna itself, with its rich culture of intellec-
tual and aesthetic innovation, had little to do with the formation of Freud’s
theories. Freud would have developed the same ideas in any number of cos-
mopolitan European cities, Gay argued, perhaps thinking (as Freud himself
did) that to label psychoanalysis Viennese was to damn it as parochial:
In truth Freud could have developed his ideas in any city endowed with a
first-rate medical school and an educated public large and affluent enough
to furnish him with patients . . . the Vienna that Freud gradually con-
structed for himself was not the Vienna of the court, the café, the salon,
or the operetta . . . His psychological theories formed in an intellectual uni-
verse large enough to embrace all of Western culture.19
Gay’s effort to limit the importance of Vienna to Freud’s formation has always
seemed to me mistaken: the fact that an intellectual development has roots
in a specific time and place has no bearing on whether it might apply to
other times and places. But I should note here that I am a student of Carl
E. Schorske, whose own subtle interpretations of psychoanalysis were grounded
in his detailed reading of Freud’s relationship to the culture and politics of
fin-de-siècle Vienna.20 Gay thought Schorske’s work deeply misguided.21
The exciting developments in the theory of history in the late 1970s and
1980s, insofar as they paid attention to psychoanalysis, marshaled its insights
to point out how jejune the pursuit of scientific objectivity was for historical
practice. Narrativist philosophy of history, deconstruction, and postmodern-
ism (especially after the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1973)
took for granted the constructed, even fictive, nature of historical discourse.
Gay’s work had no truck with this trend; he was committed to the view that
the combination of art and science in the historian’s “craft” would produce a
relatively stable form of knowledge. His use of psychoanalysis in this regard
was thus neither critical nor reductive; that is, he neither used psychoanaly-
sis as a weapon against the historical profession’s claims, nor did he use it as
a hermeneutic key to unlock the secrets of the past. Gay didn’t really have
much interest in the theory of history, but instead continued the practice of
a historian, increasingly with psychoanalytic tools in his kit. In his preface
to Freud for Historians, Gay described his interest in the psychological as a
complement to his earlier interest in the social. He was still pursuing a broad
historical approach to ideas, but now with an enhanced perception of the
context in which these ideas took shape. The internal psyche was a comple-
ment to the external society.
In contrast to Gay and most of his students, I was very much taken with the
language-oriented turn in the theory of history. I studied with Louis Mink
and Hayden White as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, and some
of my earliest publications (and more recent) were in the journal History and
Theory. When I was a student at Wesleyan in the 1970s, Norman O. Brown
(who taught there in the 1950s) was still a legendary figure for many on cam-
pus, and I devoured his Life Against Death with enormous enthusiasm. For me,
it was crucial to emphasize Freud’s understanding of the endless nature of
interpretation and his insistence, especially through the concept of transfer-
ence, on the role of desire in all forms of understanding. I saw the psychoana-
lytic enterprise as a theory of history, a theory of how we make meaning out
of memory to create a “past with which we can live.”22
* * *
Although I have a strong intellectual debt to psychoanalysis, I have not myself

undergone a personal psychoanalysis. Peter Gay, by contrast, spent years in a
training analysis, while doing research for his Freud biography. He told me that
he had sessions five times a week for five or six years. I had long been interested
in this, and in our conversation I asked him about the impact of this psycho-
logical “working through” on his professional labors as a historian. Although
he expressed no regrets about his long clinical experience, he did not seem to
think it had had much impact on his research methods. I was disappointed:
my fantasies about the revelatory impact of an intensive psychoanalysis had
led me to expect some dramatic breakthroughs (in oneself, in one’s research)
as one wrestled with one’s unconscious. I asked whether the analysis had had
any impact on his personal life, if five-days-a-week self-scrutiny over several
years had altered things in any way. He joked that “he did not find himself
much improved,” but that perhaps this was because he had started rather late
in life. “I was, after all, already happily married,” he laconically observed.
While I have not undergone psychoanalysis, I have experience of working
with the Freud industry—and from this perspective it seems to me that being
an “insider” to psychoanalysis must surely have facilitated Gay’s research, if
not through any great increase in personal insights then certainly in terms of
winning the confidence of those who controlled the archives. By becoming a
member of the “tribe,” he was able to see materials to which other research-
ers had trouble gaining access. When I worked with the various advisors to
the Library of Congress’s Freud exhibition, invariably someone would ask
whether I had been analyzed. My joking admission that I had not yet had the
pleasure would invariably produce a discernible change in attitude among
some of my colleagues. A barrier would suddenly appear that I was unable to
cross. This was less like learning, say, a technical language than joining in a
religious practice. I asked Gay how he would advise young cultural histori-
ans today who were considering undertaking a psychoanalysis, if he thought
20 Michael S. Roth
such a process made one more aware of one’s own connection to history and
to one’s own work. Gay’s response was characteristically reserved: “Do it, but
take it easy.” He did recognize that his perspective on the past was inflected
by his own psychoanalytic orientation: “[I]t liberated me for a certain way of
looking at the past . . . rather than being more partisan than I guess I would
have been without it.” I understood this to mean that through the analytic
process he was able to develop more distance on his own passions vis-à-vis
politics and history. He was able, in other words, to look at the past without
feeling an intense need to take sides. He “took it easy” in the sense that he
found a middle way between the theorists and the empiricists, between the
radicals and the reactionaries. I wonder whether he was emulating Freud, or
whether he had long been constructing a Freud in his own image? Perhaps
both.
* * *
My conversation with Peter Gay became livelier when I asked him what his-
torical discovery in his work on Freud he had found most surprising. He was
“amazed,” he told me, by the information he received concerning the end of
Freud’s life from Helen Schur, the widow of Freud’s physician Max Schur. This
had allowed him to reconstruct Freud’s request for a lethal dose of morphine
when the pain became unendurable in late September 1939, and gave him
insight into Anna Freud’s role in relation to her father and his doctor at that
time. Although this family dynamic had been subtly pointed to by Ernest
Jones in his biography, the original materials Gay examined allowed him
to paint a much more detailed portrait of Freud’s last hours and his suicide,
aided “by his loyal and loving physician and reluctantly acquiesced in by his
no less loyal and even more loving daughter.”23
In our New York conversation, Gay and I discussed how Freud’s decision
to end his life reflected the Enlightenment and Stoic worldview of rational
decision-making. If the pain is too great, if one can no longer work, then it is
time to die. But the enlightened Stoic figure is also a bourgeois family man:
Freud was committed to involving his beloved daughter Anna (though not
his wife, Martha). It was important for him to give Anna a say, even to allow
her to make the decision with Schur. “You know,” Gay said to me, “one of the
things that you must wonder about is what, how, did Anna feel. She was the
favourite daughter and the favourite person in the household and everything.
She would have put him out of his misery. It’s what she must have said.”
Finding confirmation of Freud’s instructions to Schur was deeply gratifying
to Gay, the historian eager to set the facts straight. Here, he wouldn’t have to
rely on his own reconstruction of what Freud “must have” told his doctor. He
had the evidence. And the evidence solidified Gay’s view of the founder of
psychoanalysis as an Enlightenment hero with impeccable Stoic credentials.
Like many cultural historians, Gay had noted the links tying
eighteenth-century thinkers to traditions of Stoicism.24 Passions were not
simply to be denied; one had to learn to manage them. In various ways Freud
extended these enlightened-Stoic traditions. As Amelie Rorty has noted, “The

work of psychoanalysis is modeled on the Stoic’s task of achieving an enlight-
ened self-understanding that gives psychological reactions an appropriate
direction and function.”25 But enlightened self-understanding was dependent
on certain conditions. By the summer of 1939 Freud had managed to escape
political conditions that had made the work of self-understanding impos-
sible. But his own physical condition had deteriorated to the point where
thinking itself was compromised. In such conditions, the Stoics had argued,
suicide was not only permissible, it was rational. As Cicero wrote: “When a
man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with
nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in
prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart
from life.”26 With his physician’s help and his daughter’s blessing, Freud made
his final decision. And thanks to Peter Gay’s biographical research, we now
understand the context of this decision more fully.
When Freud made that decision, he had only recently finished his last
important project, Moses and Monotheism. Although in his biography Gay
tells the reader about the controversies surrounding the book, he doesn’t go
into its arguments in detail. Moses and Monotheism was one of Freud’s highly
speculative works at the intersection of psychoanalysis and history. In it he
offered an argument about the origins of religion (in delusion and desire), the
identity of Moses (he was really an Egyptian), and the historical destiny of
the Jews (how they lived with the trauma of oppression). Some complained
that the psychoanalyst was depriving the Jews of images of leadership and
consolation when they needed them the most. Although he had started the
research years before, Freud released the work in 1938, just when a pogrom of
unimaginable horror was getting under way.
Struggling against painful cancer of the jaw and working within the
tightening noose of Nazi oppression, Freud soldiered on to complete his
final anticlerical work. Moses and Monotheism remained in the party of
Voltaire, painting religion as a collective neurosis, a delusion shot through
with fantasy, guilt, and repression. Freud—in Gay’s phrase “the incurable
secularist”27—concluded that Moses was in fact an Egyptian who had been
mythologized as a Jew by Hebrew legend. The “man Moses” gave the Jews
a stern variation of Egyptian monotheism, and he was probably murdered
by his rebellious followers. Freud saw the Jews’ embrace of monotheism in
a Mosaic (and Egyptian) form as their guilt-filled reaction to the legacy of
murder and trauma. The Christian version of communion was a more sen-
timental repetition of this same process. Moses did bequeath to the Jews a
sense of their own chosenness. He, an Egyptian prince, had chosen to lead
them, and the one and only God had chosen them as his people. But the bur-
dens of being chosen were great, and the Jews at some point rebelled against
them. Following the logic of groups he had previously set forth in Totem and
Taboo, Freud speculated that guilt following the murder of the leader led to a
fervent postrebellion embrace of the leader’s rules, in this case Mosaic mon-
otheism. This was an abstract religion, best symbolized by the prohibition
22 Michael S. Roth
against images of the deity. An “exalted sense of being a chosen people” was
linked to tendencies toward intellectual abstraction and a memory of being
persecuted by groups that did not appreciate the Mosaic gift of superiority.
These traumatic memories reinforced group identity, including an enhanced
self-regard. Freud attempted to work through the conflicts between Jewish
submission to authority (and suffering) and Jewish self-esteem.
Mark Edmundson has recently argued that the project of Moses and
Monotheism was less an attack on the Jews than a challenge to what was tak-
ing place in Germany: Freud deconstructed the desire for strong leadership
and the group erotics of submission—themes all too relevant to Jewish life in
the late 1930s.28 The Freudian purpose in analyzing desires is to provide new
understandings of them, which may free us from their unconscious, compul-
sive dimensions. By rewriting Jewish history, Freud was offering his people
the gift of increased freedom through self-awareness.
In Moses and Monotheism Freud was returning to group dynamics, a sub-
ject that had stimulated his interest for decades. So much of our behavior
in groups—be they religious, political, or social—is dictated by an urge to
escape conflict or uncertainty. Psychoanalysis teaches that we are ambiva-
lent creatures, that our desires will always be in tension with one another,
and that rather than try to resolve those tensions (in faith, in submission to
authority) we must learn to manage them. Instead of trying to erase or master
conflicts through violence or submission, we must learn to accept that we
are imperfect creatures whose needs cannot be fully satisfied. In his study of
Moses, Freud was offering a modest yet bold therapeutic intervention for his
own time, a deconstruction of patriarchal authority in the ancient past that
was again vitally relevant. “To Freud,” Edmundson explains, “the present is
fundamentally a repetition of what has come before: in fact there is, strictly
speaking, no pure present, no ‘now’ in the thought of Sigmund Freud.”29 Like
Hegel’s sense of a present that dialectically contains within it the layers of
the past, Freud’s present is saturated with repetition. Psychoanalysis provides
a “history of the present,” a language for understanding our desires as they
emerge and for providing us with a past with which we can live.
When Freud undertook the therapeutic intervention of Moses and
Monotheism, he was near the end of his life, and Europe was on the verge of
a cataclysmic war. He offered in this context not advice on how to live but a
mode of thinking that might allow us to find, in Edmundson’s nice phrase,
“words where before there has been only silence and compulsion.”30 Finding
these words meant discovering the desires that make it possible for people or
ideas to control us. Finding these words was both a historical and psychoana-
lytic contribution. They are not “magic words,” not keys that master suffer-
ing because they get the past exactly right. But they are the vehicle through
which we create understanding and shared narratives.
This picture of Freud struggling to finish Moses and Monotheism is of a man
wrestling with Jewishness and politics at the very end of his life. This is not
the Freud whose portrait Peter Gay so often painted. In an extraordinary
exchange with the writer Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books
in the mid-1980s, Gay sharply criticized the attempt to make either Freud’s
Jewishness or his politics central to the development of psychoanalysis.31
Gay’s purpose, as always, was to protect the universal value of Freud’s ideas
against readings of psychoanalysis as a product of particular historical circum-
stances. While happy enough to discuss Freud’s literary tastes or his childhood
heroes, Gay has always been loath to see cultural preoccupations seeping into
Freudian theory: preoccupations that might be said to make psychoanaly-
sis too particular—that is, too Jewish. Throughout his oeuvre Gay resisted
attempts to separate bourgeois Jews from mainstream German culture.32 And
Gay has energetically criticized attempts to understand psychoanalysis in
political terms. Is this because he sees the Enlightenment values embodied by
Freud as simply the consensus culture of educated Europeans? As a universal
historical trajectory? It is as if Freud’s cultural mastery would be threatened
if his thought were too firmly grounded in its times. Psychoanalytic values,
those Stoic values of the party of Voltaire, triumph not because of the moment
in which they are embedded but because of their inherent rationality.
Here my differences with Gay emerge most sharply, because I view Moses
and Monotheism as a work that struggles with Jewishness—with its history, its
traumas, and, above all, its relation to authority. And it is a work that engages
with these issues in full awareness of the political context of virulent anti-
Semitism. These historical particularities do not mean that Freud was writing
only about current events, or that he was writing only in a political register.
But these particularities and this register are part of what made his work so
controversial and compelling, and they are still part of what draws people to
psychoanalytic thinking today. Freud did not achieve mastery—indeed, he
was deeply ambivalent about the desire for authoritative status; he recognized
that his own work was full of holes and that psychoanalysis was necessarily
incomplete.
Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for
the sake of a schematic “normality,” nor yet to demand that the person
who has been “thoroughly analysed” shall feel no passions and develop
no internal conflicts. The business of analysis is to secure the best possi-
ble psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has
discharged its task.33
“No psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resist-
ances permit,” Freud wrote in 1910, going on to say that “our attitude toward
life ought not to be that of a fanatic for hygiene or therapy.”34 He was more
aware than most of the dangers of the fantasy of mastery, and he knew that
the project of thinking was never terminable—except by debility or death.
Freud can be considered an avatar of Stoic Enlightenment mores when he
asked his doctor for that fatal dose of morphine. I agree with Gay that the
way Freud died tells us much about the values with which he lived. But the
work to which Freud remained “harnessed” until the end wasn’t the work of
a man filled with stoic resignation to the travails of life. It was the labor of a
24 Michael S. Roth
man who believed that working through our compulsions, our desires, and
our need for authority might create greater opportunities for (not guarantees
of) freedom. These opportunities for freedom were not only political, but they
often were political. And in 1938 for the Jews, they most assuredly were. I
think they still are today.
In 1905 Freud famously wrote: “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear
becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent,
they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces itself through every pore.”35
The secrets that the patient betrays are signs that our stories may be symp-
tomatic of other ways of making sense of ourselves and of our past. There
need be no end to these stories. That’s why psychoanalysis and history are so
closely linked, both by the stories we tell about the past and by the desire to
tell them better (or get them right). Some have argued that we have moved
into an epoch when “making sense of ourselves and our past” has as lit-
tle relevance to contemporary reality as privacy on the web, psychosomatic
erectile dysfunction, or depression as a sensible response to the ways of the
world. They have argued, in other words, that history and the narratives
through which it is constituted were products of an old bourgeois, or modern
or patriarchal mode of thinking from which we are now liberated. I think
Peter Gay and I agree on this: that such a “liberation” would be a disaster for
Enlightenment and for freedom because it would remove the framework for
connecting action to the project of self-understanding.
If we are ever liberated from history, if history ever becomes superfluous to
how we live in the present and future, Freud will no longer be relevant. In that
case, psychoanalysis (and much else) will certainly disappear. Maybe then we
will truly be posthuman. But if we continue to consider the past important
for giving meaning and direction to our lives, then we will continue to turn
to psychoanalytic thinking in order to find complex, open-ended ways to tell
our histories, to work through who we are and what we want.
Despite our various differences, I take real pleasure in noting that the “psy-
choanalytic corner” of history’s garden that Peter Gay has nourished over
these many years has been fertile soil for new ways to cultivate a past with
which we can live. We have no way of knowing what will grow there in the
future, but I am confident that the seeds this remarkable historian has sown
will be part of whatever we are able to reap from this fertile ground in the
future.
Notes
1. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959); The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964);
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf,
1966); The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom (New York:
Knopf, 1969); The Bourgeois Experience, 5 volumes (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984, 1986; and New York: Norton, 1993, 1995, 1998); Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
(New York: Norton, 2007). For a complete bibliography of Gay’s writings through 2000,
see Robert L. Dieter and Mark S. Micale, Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical
Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),
377–393.
2. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the
Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Freud: A Life for
Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988); Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
3. See the companion volume, Freud: Conflict and Culture, ed. Michael S. Roth (New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1998). For an online version of the exhibition, see: http://www.loc.gov
/exhibits/freud/ (accessed January 31, 2011).
4. Daniel Zalewski, “Fissures at an Exhibition,” Lingua Franca, November–December
1995.
5. See Irwin Molotsky, “Freud Show Delayed Amid Criticism,” New York Times (December 6,
1995); Marc Fisher, “Under Attack, Library Shelves Freud Exhibit,” Washington Post
(December 5, 1995).
6. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 167.
7. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961),
vol. XXI, 75.
8. Ibid.
9. See Freud, Introductory Lectures (1916–1917) SE, XVI, 337–338; “The Expert Opinion in
the Halsmann Case,” SE, 21, 251; Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1938], SE,XXIII, 192.
10. Freud, SE, XXI, 113, 143.
11. The first sentence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 1, reads thus: “Enlightenment, under-
stood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating
human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened
earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disen-
chantment of the world.” This is the kind of Enlightenment that Freud was trying to
avoid.
12. Michael S. Roth, Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1987, 1995), 133.
13. Robert L. Dieter and Mark S. Micale, “Peter Gay: A Life in History,” the introduction to
their excellent volume, Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European
Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4–5. Dieter and
Micale connect the ego psychologists emphasis on the instinct for mastery with Gay’s
themes.
14. Robert Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical
Professsion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 410.
15. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), x.
16. Ibid., xi. See also his Art and Act: On Causes in History – Manet, Gropius Mondrian (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976).
17. Gay, Freud for Historians, xvi.
18. Ibid., 80–81.
19. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times, 10.
20. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and the Psyche (New York: Knopf, 1980).
21. He made the point repeatedly in his lectures. Also, see the exchange from the New York
Review discussed later.
22. This was my argument in Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
23. Gay, Freud: A Life, 742. Compare with Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 245–248.
24. See, e.g., Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf,
1966).
26 Michael S. Roth
25. Amelie Rorty, “Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 34.3 (1996), 355.
26. Cicero, De Finibus, trans. H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1914), III, 60–61.
27. Gay, Freud: A Life, 643.
28. Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of his Last Days (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2007).
29. Ibid., 147.
30. Ibid., 210.
31. “The Jewish Freud,” New York Review of Books (June 12, 1986): http://www.nybooks
.com/articles/archives/1987/jan/15/the-jewish-freud/ (accessed June 29, 2011).
32. See, e.g., the essays in Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans.
33. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” SE, XXIII, 250.
34. Freud, “Future Prospects of Psychoanalysis,” SE, XI, 145, 150.
35. Freud, SE, VII, 77–78.
2
Freud, Fin-de-siècle Politics, and
the Making of Psychoanalysis
T. G. Ashplant
Recent decades have seen extensive work on the history of psychoanalysis

leading to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the forces shap-
ing its development.1 A key theme in this research has been the relation-
ship between psychoanalysis and politics. In 1973 Carl Schorske published
an influential article arguing that Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis was
the product, in part, of a retreat from the Austrian political sphere—where
he and his fellow liberals and Viennese Jews were under increasing pressure
from growing anti-Semitism—into a realm of psychological interiority where
he could both escape from, and assert a superiority over, politics.2 Schorske’s
article initiated a vigorous reappraisal of the internal and external forces shap-
ing the evolution and conceptualization of psychoanalysis. In 1986 William
J. McGrath showed in richly illuminating detail how the dynamics of famil-
ial inheritance, symbolic identification, professional stalemate, and political
tension interacted with Freud’s clinical work to help shape his formulation of
his key Oedipal concept.3 McGrath also endorsed the supposedly normative
outcome of the resolution of the Oedipus complex as affording the basis for a
critique of the irrational dimension of political dynamics. John Toews devel-
oped this argument in 1991, suggesting that Freud’s practice aimed at “the
reconstruction of the foundations of public order and intersubjective com-
munity as conceptualized in the . . . German tradition of moral and cultural
Bildung, in which self-knowledge and self-mastery were not seen as alternatives
to order and community but as their necessary conditions.”4 Subsequent studies
of Freud’s life and work have centered increasingly around his Jewish identity,
clarifying the ways he negotiated that identity personally, and its impact on
both the theory and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis.5 This research
has originated within various intellectual/political currents troubled by the
apparently normative conservatism of Oedipal theory, including feminism,
27
28 T. G. Ashplant
queer theory, postcolonial theory, new Jewish cultural studies, as well as left-
ist approaches to personality structure and the possibility of social change
within modernity.
This chapter draws on this scholarship to explore different ways in which
history (understood as both the past legacy and current impress of politi-
cal and cultural events upon Freud) can be seen to have affected the con-
struction of psychoanalysis. It will review some key works, tracing a dialogue
between them, and highlighting mutually illuminating complementarities,
as well as significant divergences, between critiques from historical, polit-
ical, Jewish, queer, and feminist studies. It will focus in particular on the
impact of anti-Semitism in Freud’s life during the period leading up to the
publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the first articulation
of the Oedipus complex (sketched in late 1897, but not fully developed until
1910); and on critiques of that concept which see it as a defensive response
to political as well as personal pressures. The chapter has a double aim.
First, to argue that Freud’s formulation of psychoanalytic concepts was not
simply the product of his professional and intellectual praxis, but was also
shaped by his responses to his political and social environment; and that
these responses were themselves mediated psychically via the familial and
symbolic identifications formed in his childhood and consolidated in adoles-
cence. The difficulty of such an appraisal lies in understanding the multiple
mediations between an individual such as Freud, his familial, professional,
political, social, and cultural contexts, his psychotherapeutic practice, and
the psychoanalytic theories he formulated. I focus here on his relationship
with his father, and its mediation through the cluster of meanings around
one of his figures of identification (Hannibal, enemy of Rome). Even those
rereadings of his biography more critical of Freud draw on psychoanalytic
concepts, alongside empirical findings and other theoretical frameworks, to
interrogate, critique, and reformulate his original findings. Hence my second
aim is to use them recursively, as exemplars of how psychoanalytic thought
can contribute to historical analysis which employs a theoretically informed,
multidisciplinary approach.6
At the heart of Freud’s relationship to history was his position as a
German-speaking Jew in an increasingly conflicted multinational empire
marked (in his early adult years) by intensifying anti-Semitism. History
formed his personal and professional identity on several levels. First, through
the experiences of his parents’ generation transmitted within the family. The
position of Jews within the Austro-Hungarian Empire changed substantially
during Freud’s lifetime.7 He was born the son of Jakob Freud, an Orthodox
(though not fully observant) Jewish textile merchant, in Freiberg, Moravia, in
1856. His childhood and adolescence occurred during a period of significant
political, religious, and cultural change within the complex ethnolinguistic
and religious politics of the Empire, which affected the opportunities avail-
able to a young son of a Jewish family in contradictory ways. For Jews, it
was at first a period of positive change. Before emancipation, there had been
two options open to them: to convert, as a way of being accepted within
Freud, Politics, and Psychoanalysis 29
the dominant culture; or to remain observant Jews, a marginalized minor-

ity. They were subject to both legal restrictions and personal harassment.
Hence the incident in Jakob’s youth when, going for a walk on the Sabbath,
he encountered a Christian who struck from his head a new fur hat he was
wearing and ordered him to get off the pavement. Jakob picked up his hat
and continued in the road. As Marshall Berman has shown, the story is a
topos, emblematic of the struggle for democratic recognition of social and
political equality in the transition to modernity.8 Hence what happened to
Freud’s father had more than personal significance; it was an exemplar of a
social conflict faced by many marginalized social groups—here, the Jews of
Austria.
The impact of such experiences was mediated for Freud both through his
relationships with the members of his immediate family and household, and
through the role played in the development of his personality by figures of
identification (Biblical, Classical, canonical literary, historical), drawn from
his Jewish and German religious and cultural heritage, which themselves
encoded and transmitted political stances and values. The powerful iden-
tity figures that peopled Freud’s mental universe formed a crucial mediation
between his familial and social worlds. They allowed him to rework his own
childhood and adolescent situation in versions of what he would later theorize
as the “family romance,” while at the same time providing him with points of
entry into the drama of public life and scripts to perform as he auditioned for
possible roles.9 From among those figures who represented heroic, democratic
resistance to tyranny (Moses, Brutus, Karl Moor from Schiller’s 1781 play The
Robbers), I shall focus on Hannibal, the Carthaginian leader who had sworn
revenge against their conqueror, Rome.10 The key memory in locating the
meaning of Hannibal for Freud, retold by him in The Interpretation of Dreams,
is the story of his father’s encounter with the anti-Semite.11 As commentators
have pointed out, Jakob’s behavior conformed to the Orthodox Jewish model:
by not retaliating physically against his assailant, he retained his dignity and
demonstrated his superiority.12 But Freud rejected such behavior as a form of
cowardice, which shamed and disillusioned the adolescent son. He identi-
fied himself instead with Hannibal, the Semitic (here paralleled to Jewish)
opponent of Rome (here standing for the imperial capital Vienna and the
entrenched authority of the Roman Catholic Church within it).13 This very
strong counteridentification Freud understood as a contrast with his father’s
behavior. Like Hannibal, he swore revenge; he would carry through the lib-
eral project that his father had failed to sustain.14
The European revolutionary upheavals of 1848 led to substantial Jewish
emancipation within the Empire, but many restrictions were reimposed during
the reactionary 1850s. Defeat for Austria in the Italian war of 1859 led to the
installation of a more liberal regime and the renewed lifting of restrictions, fol-
lowed in 1867 by a fully liberal government, which established near total Jewish
equality.15 This gradual, if interrupted, liberalization opened up new possibili-
ties.16 Hence in 1859 Jakob Freud, after encountering severe business difficul-
ties in Freiberg, was able to join the large number of Jews migrating from the
30 T. G. Ashplant
imperial provinces to the capital.17 Although the family were in difficult eco-
nomic circumstances, Vienna provided the adolescent Freud with the oppor-
tunity to study at a gymnasium as the route to university.18 Shortly before he
entered the school, when he was aged between ten and twelve, Jakob—to show
how things had improved for Jews by that time (the late 1860s)—recounted the
incident of the hat.19
Schorske describes the German-speaking Jews as comprising, together with
the Germans, the “state-people” of the Empire. They benefited from the liberal
regime that the Emperor backed after 1859 (in particular, its firm support for
emancipation and tolerance).20 Freud shared his father’s enthusiasm for the
triumph of Austrian liberalism in the 1860s, and the hopes that raised of a pos-
sible political career.21 He followed the trend towards assimilation, inhabiting
a German Jewish identity that was irreligious, and—as an intellectual with a
gymnasium education—identifying strongly with German (scientific, philo-
sophical, classical, and literary) culture.22 Politically, he supported German
nationalism (i.e., the dominance of the established German-speaking power
over the lesser nationalities) while preserving long-term hopes of a possible
Greater German unification, which might further advance liberalization.23
In the quarter-century after Freud reached adulthood, anti-Semitism
(Viennese/Austrian and international) had a growing impact on his civic but
especially his professional life. His responses were shaped in part by those
existing familial and symbolic identifications. McGrath depicts Freud as
divided between desires to be a political activist and a man of knowledge
(a scientist/interpreter of dreams/healer), tracing the roots and trajectory of
Freud’s political commitments from early adolescence, and their relation to his
scientific and intellectual work. His adolescent rebelliousness began symboli-
cally with the rejection of his father’s pacific response to the anti-Semite. This
Freud, who opposed Emperor and aristocracy and enthusiastically embraced
the English and French Revolutions, first planned to study law in preparation
for a political career. However, he subsequently shifted his focus to natural
science. In 1873 he entered the University of Vienna. While he encountered
anti-Semitism there, this did not prevent his participation in student politi-
cal life, as an active member of the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens
(Reading Group of the German Students in Vienna). During the 1870s, stirred
by Bismarck’s creation of a unified German Empire and angered by the ethi-
cal implications of the Vienna stock exchange crash of 1873, the Leseverein
became increasingly hostile to the values of the liberal establishment, calling
for democratic and social reform, and a stronger promotion of the interests of
the German-speaking peoples within the Empire.24
However, the space for a Jew to participate in liberal politics soon began to
shrink. After the defeat of the narrowly based bourgeois Liberal regime in the
mid-1870s, organized political anti-Semitism became more prevalent. During
the 1880s, the Leseverein’s adoption of anti-Semitism as a key weapon for
German nationalists (in response to governmental concessions to the Slavic
peoples of the Empire) helped embed such prejudice within Austrian politi-
cal life.25 Moreover, it was at Vienna University that Freud first encountered
anti-Semitism in his professional life, at the hands of members of the liberal

class and one of its key institutions. The liberalization and rapid expansion
of the university in the early 1870s threatened traditional elites with com-
petition from previously excluded social groups; they responded by trying
to limit the numbers of those enrolling and graduating. Tensions around
anti-Semitism continued to affect Freud through the next two decades while
he struggled to establish himself professionally, culminating in the delay to
his professorship in the late 1890s.26
Freud’s choice of a scientific career did not imply rejecting all political
aims: radical science could still be seen as a weapon in an anticlerical, anti-
monarchical struggle. His enthusiastic embrace of Feuerbach’s philosophical
critique of religion gave him an intellectual weapon against religion—as a
“projection” of human hopes, fears, and capacities—which he would develop
and refine much later.27 The critique of religion formed a point of connection
with Jean-Martin Charcot, the leading French neurologist with whom Freud
studied in Paris in 1885/6.28 Jan Goldstein has traced the complex interac-
tions between the political, professional, and theoretical elements shaping
Charcot’s theory of hysteria and its influence. Charcot’s reputation rested
partly on his definition of the condition (the conversion of emotional states
into physical symptoms), which amalgamated previously disparate symp-
toms into a seemingly coherent syndrome. After the Left came to power in
the Third Republic in 1876, Charcot and his school rose to prominence as
part of an intellectual elite, linked to a network of republican politicians,
strongly supporting the anticlerical crusade of the late 1870s and 1880s. His
theories were now developed by some of his pupils to offer psychological
interpretations of phenomena such as stigmata, mystical ecstasy, or demonic
possession, thereby contributing to a wider scientific and anticlerical attack
on what were seen as obscurantist religious categories.29
Being received into the “band of brothers” who were Charcot’s favored pupils,
and becoming his German translator, represented a triumph of (temporary)
assimilation for the doubly alien—German-speaking, Jewish—Freud. But this
acceptance by a major scientific figure of the French Republic, then apparently
leading Europe in the legal emancipation and practical assimilation of Jews,
masked continuing undercurrents of anti-Semitism in French society, present
even in Charcot’s own circle and shortly to acquire a new virulence.30
Political developments in the 1890s affected Freud in two ways: intellectu-
ally, through the growing links (across Europe) between medical and racial
discourses; and professionally (and personally), through the rapid advance
of anti-Semitic politics in Vienna. The growth of biological, racially based,
anti-Semitic discourse served to give a quasi-scientific basis for the marginal-
izing and stigmatizing of Jews. These discourses figured Jews as sexual and
gender anomalies. While Jewish women were represented as seductive and
excessively sexual, Jewish men were presented as nonmasculine—either
feminized (and hence hysterical) or homosexual.31 In this way medical, and
especially psychological, theorizing became more centrally implicated in
political stances.
32 T. G. Ashplant
At first, Charcot’s recognition of male hysteria, and insistence on its uni-

versal possibility, was appealing to Freud, serving to deflect the scapegoat-
ing of Jews as the quintessential hysterics. However, by the early 1890s he
had become troubled by Charcot’s insistence on the hereditary character of
hysteria, which created an opening for precisely the types of racial discourse
increasingly central to anti-Semitism.32 Consequently Freud inserted into his
1893 translation of Charcot’s Tuesday Lectures (without the author’s agree-
ment) a series of footnotes of his own, which directly criticized this view. This
exceptional step made evident Freud’s alertness to the political potentials of
psychological theory.33 Over the next few years, this issue would become
even more pressing.34
The later 1890s were a time of crisis for Freud. Political shifts among the
lower classes—the German speakers towards either socialism or anti-Semitism,
the other peoples of the Empire towards ethnic nationalism—precipitated a
crisis of liberalism, culminating in the election in 1895 of the demagogic
anti-Semite Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian Social Party (CSP), as mayor
of Vienna. This created an atmosphere that, menacing for Jews in general,
also damaged Freud’s chances of a professorship. According to Schorske, these
developments “penetrated Freud’s psychic life,” leading almost to despair.35
In this hostile climate Freud turned away from the public political realm to
focus on the interior world of the psyche, thereby opening up the creative
imaginative space in which psychoanalysis was born. Meanwhile, the death
of Freud’s father in late 1896 provoked “a crisis of professional failure and
political guilt.”36 This led him to embark on his self-analysis, one of the key
foundations of psychoanalysis, which he would later record indirectly in The
Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud’s self-analysis coincided with the deepening crisis of anti-Semitism
in Austria. In spring 1897 Prime Minister Badeni, caught between the contra-
dictory demands of the Czech nationalists and the German liberals, made a
deal with the CSP whereby the Emperor, who had hitherto refused to con-
firm Lueger as mayor, now did so in return for the CSP’s support for the
government. The liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse denounced this decision,
reflecting the anxieties of the Jewish population that it represented. It was an
especially hard blow for Freud, who loathed Lueger and saw in the Emperor’s
action a replay of his father’s yielding to anti-Semitic pressure.37
The Interpretation of Dreams, Schorske points out, is a text saturated with
these politics.38 In it, Freud recounts several key dreams of his own from these
years to demonstrate his new theory that dreams are the disguised fulfill-
ment of suppressed wishes. Their surface content, which overtly or by asso-
ciation relates to contemporary politics, Freud translates into the infantile or
sexual desires that he asserts are their deep content. The sequence of dreams
is thus seen to endorse his option for science, laying to rest his inclination
toward politics. Yet their political content can also be read, Schorske suggests,
as showing a Freud divided between a long-standing and continuing impulse
towards political engagement, and an alternative commitment to a healing
and enlightening science.39
Freud’s responses to these crises, on all levels, were mediated via his famil-
ial and symbolic identifications. Schorske articulates his reading of the politi-
cal strand in The Interpretation of Dreams around Freud’s relationship to Rome,
which forms a prism through which many of his identifications can be seen
refracted. During this period, Freud had a succession of “Rome dreams,”
which harked back to political themes from his adolescent years. Rome had
two distinct clusters of meaning for him. His love of the city and of Classical
culture had been strengthened after he formulated a parallel between the
methods of psychoanalysis and archaeology. But Rome was also the home
and symbol of the church, which had dominated Austria since the success-
ful Counter-Reformation of the early seventeenth century (and which was
implicated in anti-Semitism). This conflict of desire and revulsion gave rise
to what Freud termed his Rome-neurosis: several times in the later 1890s he
traveled to Italy, but each time failed to visit Rome.40 After one such failed
trip, in summer 1897, Freud realized that his itinerary had retraced the route
of Hannibal (who had sought to destroy Rome, but likewise failed to reach it);
and then recalled his father’s story of confrontation with the anti-Semite, the
origin of his own Hannibal identification.41 Reflecting on his recognition of
this unconscious determinant of his journey, he recalled a remark compar-
ing Hannibal’s impatience to reach Rome with that of Johann Winckelmann,
the eighteenth-century lover of classical antiquity, and pioneer of art history
and archaeology, whose conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism had
enabled him to hold posts in the Vatican and pursue his profession.42 Rome
for Freud was thus both the enemy and the promised land (of assimilation
into Roman Catholic Austrian culture), his attitude towards it a perpetually
ambivalent one of longing as well as hostility.43 Winckelmann stood in con-
trast to Hannibal, as the man who became an “insider” in order to gain access
to the cultural riches of Rome.44
In his clinical practice during the mid-1890s, Freud had developed his own
theory of hysteria as resulting from the sexual seduction/abuse of children
by adults—often fathers. But almost as soon as he had published it, doubts
arose, which—over two years of uncertainty and conceptual doubling-back—
led to a radical reformulation and reversal. In what was a first adumbration
of the Oedipus complex, he now proposed that hysteria was the result of
premature sexual desire of child for mother, with concomitant hatred of the
father.45 While Freud worked repeatedly on his own relationship with his
father during his self-analysis, his dreams give evidence of continuing hostil-
ity towards Jakob intertwined with political anger.46 In his analyses of these
dreams, Freud traces rebellion against political authorities back to its roots
in rebellion against the father. “Patricide replaces regicide, psychoanalysis
overcomes history. Politics is neutralized by a counterpolitical psychology.”47
Freud went on to generalize and theorize his own experience of patricidal
wishes into a common inheritance of mankind, in the form of the Oedipus
complex. As Schorske notes, this involves stressing the sexual dimension of
the myth, while omitting reference to its political content (Oedipus as king
of a threatened polity).48 Moreover, as others have pointed out, it involves
34 T. G. Ashplant
focusing on the son’s hostile impulse towards the father, omitting the father’s
original, and equally if not more hostile, impulse towards the son, which the
myth encodes.49 The move from the seduction theory to the Oedipus com-
plex shifted the focus away from the impingement of external, “accidental”
historical events towards internal, “timeless” impulses deriving from “univer-
sal” aspects of human biology and parenting.50
In what ways did Freud’s imbrication in the history and politics of his time
influence the core concepts of psychoanalysis? Commentators have given
two sorts of answers to this question, the differences between them often
articulated around the conceptualization of the Oedipus complex. The first
type of answer comes from scholars who broadly accept Freud’s own account
of the nature and value of his psychological theorizing. Thus McGrath devel-
ops his biographical narrative (converging with Schorske’s, though with some
differences of emphasis) along a trajectory sketched out by Freud himself, and
consonant with psychoanalytic models of maturing.51 By acknowledging and
working through his hostility to his father, Freud had enabled himself to take
up a more paternal role. In the political realm, his father’s response to the
anti-Semitic attack could now be regarded as a Jewish maintenance of dignity.
Freud could thus reject his residual adolescent rebelliousness, and—in joining
the Jewish cultural organization B’nai B’rith in late 1897—come to terms with
his Jewish identity.52 This internal shift also affected Freud’s wider theoretical
work. The seduction theory had blamed the father; only with difficulty could
Freud give it up. However, his analysis of the way his route through Italy had
been driven by a neurotic fixation gave him an insight into the power of
unconscious fantasy. This insight could be applied in turn to the origins both
of hysteria (now seen as not necessarily dependent on external trauma) and
of political passions.53
McGrath’s analysis thus moves between the personal, the professional, and
the political. Freud attempted, within himself and then within the wider world,
to defuse the irrationality that fed the politics of 1890s. As he plunged deeper
into the realms of his psyche, and found the roots of his own adolescent politi-
cal rebelliousness in his family history and his place within its constellation,
he was able to withdraw energies from his inner conflicts and engage more
fruitfully with the external world.54 Where Schorske sees a withdrawal from
politics (offset only by verbal or symbolic protest), McGrath emphasizes rather
an (attempted) triumph over the political: Freud delineates and analyzes—and
thereby provides the possibility of mastering—the irrational identifications
that fuel demagogic politics.55
In a lucid discussion of these issues, Toews widened the perspective, argu-
ing that Freud’s work should be seen as one of a range of responses, by Jewish
intellectuals of his generation, to a crisis of liberalism, which was in no sense
unique to, though especially acutely felt by, Jews. “The theoretical compre-
hension and practical cure of Freud’s suffering as a Jew was thus inextricably
bound up with the analysis and possible cure of liberal politics and culture.”56
But Toews also broadened the implications of Freud’s achievement beyond its
specific Austrian and Jewish contexts, advancing what might be termed the
“liberal pessimistic” conclusion that Freud’s work should be read as offering

a general analysis of the necessary constraints on human desires (and hence
the costs) imposed by entry into culture. Thus Toews too ultimately adopts
an orthodox reading of Freud’s achievement, in which the crucial gain, in
the shift from the seduction theory to the Oedipus complex, is recognition
of the existence of unconscious psychic reality, and emphasis on the subject’s
active role in constructing the meaning of their experiences. “Psychosexual
conflict, whether resolved ‘normally’ or pathologically, was ultimately trace-
able not to particular events but to the sexual subject’s response to the uni-
versal, inhibiting, natural and sociocultural, conditions in which desire is
structured during the first stages of every life history.”57
However, there remains an ambiguity in Toews’s interpretation. He asserts
that “the reality reference of the Oedipus theory was not to sequences of
external events, but to the contextually structured formation of uncon-
scious, ‘subjective’ desire.” How much emphasis is to be given to the term
“contextually”? Some of Toews’s formulations accord considerable weight to
the social. So, while he presents Freud’s conflicts with his father and brothers
as products of his immediate family constellation, he also indicates several
ways in which they interacted with the public realm. They could provide a
source of energy for political rebellion. More crucially, they could also be
in part a product of public conflicts: for instance, the ambiguity of Freud’s
father’s mandate to him, to be loyal to his Jewish inheritance, arose from the
social/political dilemmas of living as a Jew in an anti-Semitic society. And
Toews melds McGrath’s more individually focused interpretation of Freud’s
adolescent political rebelliousness into a wider generational rebellion of the
sons of the post-1848 Austrian liberals against what they perceived as the
weaknesses and failings of their fathers’ generation.58
However, the problematic character of Toews’s position becomes more
apparent in his reading of the case history of Ida Bauer (“Dora”). He treats it
as, from Freud’s perspective, consolidating and exemplifying the conceptual
gains of the Oedipus complex; so he insists on the primacy, within the psy-
choanalytic model, of the subjective process of meaning-making.
Although Freud did not deny the factual accuracy of Dora’s description of
her external traumas and betrayals (her “seduction”), he insisted that it
was the inner psychic conflict produced by the history of her own active
unconscious desires that lay at the root of her illness . . . By refusing to
undertake the discipline of self-reflection which could bring her into pos-
session of her own history, she remained determined by her past, and thus
unfree.59
The subject is here presented as always already capable of taking responsibil-

ity for their life. This approach fails to recognize the degree to which the
adolescent Ida Bauer’s subjectivity has been constructed through her famil-
ial and sociopolitical contexts, in particular the circuits of collusive sexual
exchange in which she is enmeshed.60
36 T. G. Ashplant
The second, more negative, evaluations come from scholars critical of Freud’s
treatment of the relationship between the social and the psychological, who
challenge what they see as a naturalization of aspects of human develop-
ment, which should rather be understood in terms of responses to specific
social pressures. In particular, they see the Oedipus complex—for Freud the
cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory—as a defensive crystallization (for both
personal and political reasons), which occludes as much as it reveals. This
appears as a common theme in several different critical approaches, which
nevertheless wish to use elements of psychoanalytic understanding. Whereas
both McGrath and (even more strikingly) Toews represent the formulation of
the Oedipus complex as the breakthrough to what is distinctively psychoan-
alytic—the reality (and even primacy) of intrapsychic process—many critics
see this “hinge-moment” in the trajectory of Freud’s thinking as a stepping
back from his earlier, more socially oriented insights.
In the last 20 years, scholars have drawn particular attention to the roles
attributed to gender and sexuality within anti-Semitic discourses, and their
implications for Freud’s theorizing. Where Schorske and McGrath identify
a sort of benign splitting, whereby Freud in turning away from the politi-
cal realm opened up a psychic and intellectual space where the unconscious
could be thought, Daniel Boyarin diagnoses a more malign process. For him
there can be no “withdrawal” from the effects of anti-Semitism into a pro-
tected space of creativity; on the contrary, these effects reach into the core of
psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus complex representing a defensive evasion
of Freud’s earlier insights into the polymorphous nature of sexuality. Whereas
McGrath and Toews highlight the gain represented by the theorization of the
Oedipus complex—the recognition of the dynamic force of internal psychic
reality—while Schorske notes its exclusion of the directly political, Boyarin
focuses instead on what he sees as the very presence of the political within its
presentation of gender and sexuality.
Boyarin’s perspective derives from postcolonial and queer theory. He under-
stands Freud as a would-be assimilated Jew, “white, but not quite,” reacting
to the growing pressure of anti-Semitism.61 Among assimilated Jews, now
faced with this racialized discourse, the figure of the Jewish man came under
intense scrutiny. The key difference in this new ideological configuration was
that now Jews could not assimilate, whether by changing their dress, customs,
or religion. Difference/Otherness was now seen as rooted in the (racialized)
body. This racialized anti-Semitism was also linked to an intensifying gen-
dered “heterosexuality,” understood in the Foucauldian sense as a norma-
tive sexual identity. An accompanying homophobia created a newly defined
homosexual identity, seen as simultaneously nonmasculine and feminine.
In this new gender/sexuality framework, the male Jew was positioned as the
negative antitype, at once hypersexual, and effeminate or queer.62
Assimilating Jews had adopted the dominant Western model of mascu-
linity, actively differentiating themselves from the older practices of the
Ostjuden —which included a peaceful and scholarly model of masculinity
(devoted to Talmudic and other study) markedly different from the dominant
masculinity of the Christian west.63 The pressure of the new anti-Semitic

discourse threatened to undermine the possibility of such an assimilated
Jewish masculinity. Moreover, the years 1895–1897 saw two legal trials lead-
ing to moral panics whose implications spread across Europe: that of Oscar
Wilde giving rise to intense antihomosexual anxiety and hostility, and that
of Alfred Dreyfus further fueling nationalist-inflected anti-Semitism.64 These
developments provoked diverse Jewish responses, including the creation of
the identity of “muscle Jews”—conforming to the most marked contempo-
rary model of assertive masculinity—to demonstrate that Jews could indeed
fully meet this hegemonic ideal.65
Wishing to disrupt the heteronormative pressure exerted by the Oedipal
theory (long dominant in psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s own nonjudg-
mental personal statements on homosexuality), Boyarin describes it as an
“inexorably heterosexual, even heterosexist concept” with a “heteronorma-
tive purport,” which suppresses one dimension of the polymorphous nature
of sexuality—male passivity, the boy’s desire for (penetration/fertilization by)
his father.66 The development of the concept occurred during the years (late
1897–August 1901) when Freud was gradually separating himself from his
previously intense homoerotic attachment to his then closest friend and con-
fidant, the Berlin doctor Wilhelm Fliess. Repudiating his earlier, more tolerant
attitude, in the face of anti-Semitic positioning of the Jewish male as passive/
effeminate/homosexual, Freud enacted a double suppression: theoretically,
of the passive, desiring male; and personally, of his own (florid) homoerotic
desire for Fliess.67 This suppression of male desire for passivity allowed Freud
to negate the risk of being seen—because he was a Jew—as an effeminized/
queer man.68 He switched his focus from hysteria (centered on girls [and boys]
who were passively seduced/abused by their fathers) to neurosis (centered on
boys actively desiring to seduce their mothers). He erected the Oedipus com-
plex, and the castration complex, as the markers of the active desiring male
subject.69 Boyarin’s analysis further allows him to align Freud’s project with
that of his contemporary Theodor Herzl. Whereas Zionism for Herzl was a
(displaced) fulfillment of the project of assimilation, translocated to the land
of Israel, for Freud the Oedipus complex likewise secured assimilation, ensur-
ing that the Jew could now “pass” as a fully normal (white, “Protestant”)
male.70 Boyarin argues that Freud’s marginal and highly conflicted position
as a Jew both provided him with opportunities for insight, and condemned
him to certain blindnesses, which curtailed or undercut those insights.71
Jill Salberg has modified Boyarin’s argument by insisting on the need to
understand how such widely circulating anti-Semitic discourses were inter-
nalized by Freud. She starts from the figure he both idealized and marginal-
ized—his mother. Amalia, she argues, was a troubling parent for her young
son: fierce and powerful, but also needy and demanding, she increased Freud’s
need for a strong father who could stand up to her. This created an intrafamil-
ial dynamic later overlaid by the adolescent Freud’s longing for a strong pub-
lic father, a longing filled with the cluster of fantasy-identifications around
Hannibal.72 From this, Salberg develops a case that Freud’s conscious response
38 T. G. Ashplant
to anti-Semitism, one of “combative defiance,” becomes a persona that “Freud

adopts and purports to be: proud of being a Jew and independent in his think-
ing. But beneath this image lies the disowned, disavowed representation of the
passive, unheroic father and of denigrated status, race, and Jewish culture.”73
Appropriating one central element of his Jewish inheritance, the rabbis’ stress
on intellect as a powerful weapon, Freud constructed himself as a heroic con-
quistador of science.74 Salberg depicts Freud’s inner world as comprising both
identifications and disidentifications with each parent: he rejects his father’s
passivity, but like him is scholarly; he distances himself from his mother,
but like her is “narcissistically vulnerable to criticism, demanding attention
and loyalty while anxiety ridden about his health.”75 This psychic structure
interacted with the patriarchal, anti-Semitic, heteronormative, and homo-
phobic discourses circulating in late nineteenth-century Vienna to produce
in Freud what Salberg terms a repressive split “against femininity, Jewishness,
passivity, and religion, with the complementary idealization of masculinity,
activity, science, and atheism.”76 This split was then enshrined at the heart of
psychoanalysis through the Oedipus complex.
Scholars working in what has been termed the new Jewish cultural stud-
ies have explored Freud’s relationship to his own Jewishness more broadly,
suggesting that he sought to efface markers of (his own and others’) Jewish
identity in his work not only to avoid the marginalization of psychoa-
nalysis as a “merely Jewish” theory/practice, but for more deeply personal
reasons. Jay Geller has extended Boyarin’s approach chronologically and the-
matically. He understands Freud as someone traumatized by the perpetual,
cumulative pressure of anti-Semitism in public discourse and practice.77 He
interprets that anti-Semitism as a product of the anxieties generated in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire by the transition to modernity.78 In a newly mobile
society in which identity and status were no longer symbolically indicated,
social groups increasingly defined themselves in opposition to one another.
The Austro-Germans sought to distinguish themselves rigidly from the
German-speaking Jews who were their fellow state-people.79 Paradoxically,
as Jews increasingly assimilated—embracing German kultur and privatizing
the practice of their religion—the need to mark division grew stronger.80 The
appeal of an apparently scientific racial difference, which established a hierar-
chy of evolutionary development in which the (Jewish) Other was primitive,
was that it could be foundationally inscribed on the body, and thus natu-
ralized. A central element of that segregation was the construction of Jews
as anomalous in gender and sexuality: the men feminized or homosexual,
the women virilized or hypersexual. In their continuing struggle against the
threat of this projected Other, Austro-Germans could reinforce the ideologi-
cal gender division that structured public and private life, and sustain their
privileges as (would-be self-authored) males.81
Geller reads Freud as perpetually ambivalent about his Jewishness: always
ready to adopt and assert it as a name, but anxious to dissociate himself
from those negative identities the male Jew was held to incarnate: effemi-
nized, homosexual, degenerate.82 He locates, as the central trope in Freud’s
relationship to his Jewish identity, circumcision: that which inscribes on the

(male) body the inescapable mark of Jewishness.83 It is circumcision that Freud
is at great pains to disavow.84 This disavowal takes the form of the theory of
the castration complex, in his idiosyncratic use of that term.85 Circumcision is
presented by Freud as the root of anti-Semitism: it reminds men of the threat
of castration, while displacing it onto the despised Jews who are understood
to have undergone it.86 His theorization of the castration complex serves first
to universalize what was otherwise a specifically Jewish predicament: now all
men have to face the threat of genital mutilation.87 Then, since the resolution
of the complex is the route into adult (heterosexual) masculinity, it no longer
signifies that which (like circumcision) emasculates/effeminizes but rather
that which virilizes. The universal experience of castration thus screens or
effaces the specifically Jewish experience of circumcision.88
Geller tracks this ambivalence about Jewishness through a series of Freud’s
writings, tracing in detail the efforts he makes to occlude the presence of the
figure of the (circumcised) male or (masculinized or hypersexual) female Jew.89
But this (re)solution has to be shored up by a perpetual struggle against any-
thing that might once again associate him with the supposedly negative quali-
ties of Jewish masculinity: desire for men, feminine positioning, passivity.90
Like Boyarin, Geller—reading Freud through a postcolonial framework—
emphasizes the insights that his marginal/oppressed position enabled. As a
“black man” with a white mask, Freud internalized racial, gendered, sexual,
and familial ideologies, which he both projected onto a range of Others
(Ostjuden, women, homosexuals, primitives), but also sought to transform by
universalizing them.91 It is this ambivalence, embedded in the heart of psy-
choanalytic theory, that has allowed it to be construed as supporting both
conservative and radical politics.92
A broadly leftist critique of Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis has like-
wise seen the intergenerational and gendered conflicts with which he and
his patients grappled as arising in significant part from a particular historical
configuration: the transition to modernity in the later nineteenth-century
Austro-Hungarian Empire. John Brenkman suggests that, in the late 1890s,
Freud saw no possibility of direct intervention in his patients’ circumstances.
While playing down (though not denying) the reality of sexual abuse, he
focused instead on an intrapsychic understanding of the sources of desire and
the mechanisms of defense. As Brenkman points out, there was no logical
necessity to construct a choice between the fact of seduction/abuse and the
reality of desire/psychic process; both could be involved in the same event.93
Moreover, seduction/abuse need not refer only to actual sexual abuse, but
could indicate more broadly the many ways in which parents can establish
distorting patterns of relationship. Instead, Freud—omitting the prior role of
the father’s murderous action—located the repressed desire and aggression of
the son as the prime mover.94
Brenkman regards the Oedipus complex as articulating “a process in which
desire and self-recognition are being shaped by cultural as well as psychical
representations, by ideological as well as libidinal forms, by an array of social
40 T. G. Ashplant
relations that includes but is not restricted to the family.” Freud, with his
medical/clinical focus, distilled the Oedipal triangle out of the network of
social relations in which a family and its members participate. Avoiding those
issues of gender, power, and community which that participation involved,
he treated the patient as an isolated individual, translating social and ideo-
logical interactions into the framework of a psychic economy.95
Brenkman supports his critique with a reading of the case history of Ernst
Lanzer (the “Rat Man”). He extends Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of the
Oedipus complex, matching Lacan’s division of the paternal figure—into an
ideal social symbol, and an actual (debased) father who can never meet this
ideal—with a parallel division of the maternal figure; and adapts Lacan’s con-
cept of the “individual myth” to interpret how Lanzer’s identification with
his father was worked out in the dynamics of his blocked career and marriage
plans.96 He comments that: “The double imperative of Oedipal theory—that
neurotic symptoms derive from earliest childhood and, specifically, from
overwrought impulses prematurely blocked by obstacles—deflects Freud from
any attempt to sort out the formative role played by moral disequilibrium and
the social hierarchy within which the Rat Man’s life unfolded.”97 This can be
detected in two major themes of the case. First, Freud traces Lanzer’s difficul-
ties back to a childhood threat of castration from his father. He notes but does
not attend to the conflicts in Lanzer’s adult life, especially the pressure put
upon him by his mother to make a financially advantageous rather than a
love marriage (thereby following in his father’s footsteps). The second theme
is hidden from the reader of the case history, and revealed only by compar-
ison with the surviving notes that Freud made shortly after each session.
From this, it becomes apparent that the published version omitted significant
details. These omissions, though supposedly made to preserve confidential-
ity, also had a systematically distorting effect, by hiding Lanzer’s exploita-
tive relationships with several working-class women with whom he came
into contact. One of these women, a dressmaker employed by the family,
killed herself following a rejection by Lanzer, who then reproached himself
for having failed to “save” her by offering her his love. Freud interprets this
self-reproach as evidence of Lanzer’s delusional sense (rooted in his infancy)
of the omnipotence of his wishes, of his love and hatred. But as the case notes
reveal, Lanzer had first made aggressive sexual advances to the woman and
then spurned her wish that he display affection for her. Freud “translates”
what could be read as Lanzer’s (distorted because omnipotent) self-rebuke
over his exercise of current power—his ability to exploit his social position
vis-à-vis working-class women—into a guilt-laden reaction rooted in infantile
fantasy. Once again, the focus of the Oedipus complex on the active sexuality
of the boy child shifts attention away from the aggressive, at times violent,
sexuality of the adult male.98
In the light of these biographical and textual rereadings, it is possible to
understand more fully both the pressures shaping Freud’s conceptualization
of the Oedipus complex, and what its contours excluded. Those pressures bore
on him at several levels: from his self-analysis, with the painful feelings of
loss in the recent and distant past it stirred up; from his continuing attempts
to attain a more secure professional position (both as a doctor, and as a theo-
rist of psychology); and from the growing impact of renewed (populist, racial,
and scientific) anti-Semitism. Personally, it can be seen as shaped in part
to achieve self-protective ends. It reinforced his psychic defenses in relation
to his own earlier life, instating him as an active agent (defying his father,
desiring his mother) rather than a passive victim (of early losses, of conflicts
around dependence, of displacement from his mother’s sole love, of conflicts
with her).99 Politically, the Oedipal theory preserved patriarchal privileges:
inverting the abuse of daughters by fathers into the seduction of mothers by
sons; marginalizing male sexual aggression against women (including family
members, servants, and working-class employees); and subtending a norma-
tive account of manhood, which emphasized activity, autonomy, and hetero-
sexuality. It protected Jewish men from association with a perverse (hyper- or
homosexual) masculinity. These personal needs intersected with wider social
pressures to produce a turning away from the more sociological implications
of his work earlier in the decade. As a consequence, psychoanalysis developed
as a body of thought that simultaneously showed the development of sexual
identity to be a historical rather than a purely biological process, and yet
restated conventional gender roles as the normative outcome of that process.
Viewed from this perspective, Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex
might seem an entirely antipolitical move. But Brenkman also offers a detailed
articulation of Toews’s claim that Freud’s response to the political crisis of the
1890s was not simply a retreat into a fantasized triumph over the political.
Drawing on the work of Carol Pateman and Partha Chatterjee, Brenkman
locates Freud’s thinking in the context of the transition to modernity, entail-
ing an ever-increasing separation between the public spheres of the market
and the polis (into which men—but not women—entered as supposedly free
and equal agents) and the private sphere of the home and family (over which
men as husbands and fathers exercised authority).100 Yet this model of moder-
nity was shot through with contradictions. On the one hand, the limitations
and setbacks of liberalism meant that the public sphere, torn by national
and racial conflict, was not an equal arena for all men of the Empire.101 On
the other hand, the supposed separation of the private sphere, as a haven
from such conflicts, was far from complete. The intimacies of family life
were closely bound up with questions of career and marriage choice, which
impinged on both individuals’ and families’ social status and prospects.102
That putative mastery over events that, in the crisis of liberalism, had been
lost in the political arena was, for Freud, to be regained at the level of clinical
practice through an “unprecedented experience” of individual self-reflection
on family relationships. To develop the necessary theoretical language and
therapeutic techniques that would make such introspection possible, he had
to marginalize his patients’ social and political experiences.103 However, this
bracketing-off of the political in the interests of understanding the psycho-
logical did not represent a permanent exclusion; the political “repressed” at
the level of the wider society was to return in Freud’s later, more speculative
42 T. G. Ashplant
works, as he sought to apply his theoretical and clinical discoveries to the

analysis of politics.
The dialogue between these commentators has highlighted an important
methodological issue. As Salberg has emphasized, and as McGrath showed in
detail, it is crucial to understand the ways in which contextual features and
discourses of the late nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the
European medical world, were not simply external forces for Freud to negotiate
or confront, but were also appropriated into his inner psychic world, through
his dis/identifications with his parents and historical/Biblical/literary figures.
These emotional constellations and identification figures mediated the ways
political and cultural structures and developments shaped Freud’s percep-
tions of and responses to the events of his time. It is also important to grasp
the fluidity and potential ambiguity/ambivalence of such identifications.104
Freud’s work can certainly be read as making possible a critical understand-
ing of the mobilization of unconscious processes and emotional energies by
political projects. He never completely abandoned his political concerns.
His later, more speculative, writings of the 1920s and 1930s were among
the first such analyses, culminating in Moses and Monotheism (1937), which
has attracted much commentary for its attempt to understand the roots and
dynamics of anti-Semitism.105
However, some sympathetic critics of Freud’s achievement, while acknowl-
edging (and themselves employing) his advances in psychological understand-
ing, have seen the disengagement of psychoanalysis from wider social and
political involvement as constituting a loss. Its emphases on the internal world
of the individual, and the universal, biological/familial dimensions of experi-
ence, can also be—and have been in practice—used to evacuate the political,
reducing it to an epiphenomenon of the psychic.106 These critics have ques-
tioned (the resolution of) the Oedipus complex as offering an adequate con-
ceptualization of the transition to mature adulthood, and suggested that this
theorization created an ambiguous legacy at the heart of psychoanalysis, one
allowing both normalizing and critical interpretations of gender construction.
The Oedipal focus on the centrality of childhood events, which Freud installed
as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, came at the expense of attention to the
contemporary dynamics of the analysand’s life, omitting the levels of media-
tion between the abstracted dynamics of the Oedipal/familial configuration
and the wider social and political processes. These critical biographical reread-
ings have sought to integrate those absent dimensions into their reappraisals of
Freud’s work, leading to a richer understanding of the strengths and limitations
of his achievement. They also themselves demonstrate the value of integrating
psychoanalytic with historical and sociological perspectives.
Notes
1. My thanks to Daphne Briggs, Elspeth Graham, Gill Scott, Stephen Yeo, the editors
of this volume, and (especially) Mike Roper for commenting helpfully on successive
drafts.
2. Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American

Historical Review 78.2 (1973), 328–347, cited here from his Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics
and Culture (1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 180–207. Subsequent scholarship
has modified Schorske’s overall depiction of a crisis of Austrian liberalism, narrow-
ing its scope to refer specifically to a cultural elite—but one that was, in practice,
predominantly Jewish; this reframing nevertheless leaves his argument still appli-
cable to Freud. John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins
of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History, new
edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and for a summary, his “Class,
Culture and the Jews of Vienna,” in Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, and Gerhard Botz, eds.,
Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987),
39–58. For reviews of more recent interpretations of Vienna 1900, see Steven Beller,
“Introduction” and Allan Janik, “Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems,”
in Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2001), 1–25 and 26–56, respectively.
3. William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
4. John E. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and of Our Time,”
Journal of Modern History 63.3 (1991), 531. Cf. Beller, “Introduction,” 16.
5. Jay Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007), “Introduction,” esp. 17–30.
6. Cf. T. G. Ashplant, Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class and Politics in Britain, 1900–30
(London: Rivers Oram, 2007), chapter 1.
7. Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 44–50; Dennis B. Klein, “Assimilation and the Demise of
Liberal Political Tradition in Vienna: 1860–1914,” in David Bronsen, ed., Jews and
Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979),
234–261.
8. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish
Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 33–39; Klein, “Assimilation,”
234–237; Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(London: Verso, 1983), 217–228.
9. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 92–93. The core contrasting Biblical pair, with whom other
symbolic figures come to be linked or fused, are Joseph (the insider, the Jew who rises
to power in Egypt, the interpreter of dreams : 27–34, 39–44, 46–47, 50–51, 55–57, 88)
and Moses (the rebel, who leads the Jewish people out of bondage and toward the
promised land: 27, 50–51, 77, 88). For Freud’s later presentation of Moses in Moses and
Monotheism, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 249–250, 266–267.
10. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 70–71, 83, 285–287, 291–292, 316 (Brutus); 66–77, 80, 96
(Karl Moor); 59–67, 70–72, 75–76, 83, 212; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 191–193
(Hannibal).
11. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 191; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 60–64, 207–208,
212–213, 228.
12. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 34–37; Jill Salberg, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud’s Jewish
Identity Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 17.2 (2007), 201–202.
13. On the politics of mid-century Austrian Catholicism, see Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,
140–143.
14. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 191; cf. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 62–67.
15. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 30.
16. Salberg, “Hidden,” 200.
17. Michael Schröter and Christfried Tögel, “The Leipzig Episode in Freud’s Life (1859):
A New Narrative on the Basis of Recently Discovered Documents,” Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 76 (2007), 205; Sean Armstrong, “Freud’s Hannibal: New Light on Freud’s
Moses: In Memory of David Bakan, 1921–2004,” Psychoanalytic Review 95.2 (2008),
232–233.
44 T. G. Ashplant
18. A possibility not open to his parents’ generation: Salberg, “Hidden,” 199.
19. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 81–82, suggests that this incident, and the resulting disillu-
sionment with Jakob, may have occurred rather later, at age 13–14. Salberg, “Hidden,”
201.
20. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 5–6, 116–118, 125–129, 137–140, 144–145; Klein,
“Assimilation,” 238–242.
21. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 188–189; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 59–60, 78–79, 82–83.
Cf. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 528; Klein, “Assimilation,” 235–239.
22. On Jewish assimilationism, see Beller, Vienna and the Jews, chapter X; Toews,
“Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 525–526, 528; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 44–55.
23. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 193–198; William J. McGrath, “Student Radicalism in
Vienna,” Journal of Contemporary History 2.3 (1967), 183–189.
24. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 78–79, 84–86, 88, 89–91; McGrath, “Student Radicalism,”
183–195.
25. Salberg, “Hidden,” 200; Klein, “Assimilation,” 241–247; Toews, “Historicizing
Psychoanalysis,” 530–531.
26. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 532–533; cf. Toby Gelfand, “Sigmund-sur-Seine:
Fathers and Brothers in Charcot’s Paris,” in Toby Gelfand and John Kerr, eds., Freud and
the History of Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1992), 33.
27. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 104–110, 119–121.
28. Ibid., 152–159; cf. 79.
29. Jan Goldstein, “The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late
Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 54.2 (1982), 214–215, 221–239.
30. Gelfand, “Sigmund-sur-Seine,” 33, 36–37, 43–46, 48, 50–51, 52 n.7.
31. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xvii, 210–216, 218; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 6–12, 77;
Salberg, “Hidden,” 203–205.
32. Jan Goldstein, “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in
Fin-de-siècle France,” Journal of Contemporary History 20.4 (1985), 521–551.
33. Estelle Roith, “Hysteria, Heredity and Anti-Semitism: Freud’s Quiet Rebellion,”
Psychoanalysis and History 10.2 (2008), 149–168; Gelfand, “Sigmund-sur-Seine,” 47–49,
51; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 170.
34. Roith, “Hysteria,” 163–164. She suggests (155–156, 162) that one reason for Freud’s
break with Josef Breuer (his older mentor and coauthor of Studies on Hysteria) was the
latter’s continuing stress on a hereditary element in the causes of hysteria.
35. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 184–185, 187 (quoted), 188, 204 n.5; Toews, “Historicizing
Psychoanalysis,” 527–528.
36. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 185–188 (quoted at 186); cf. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery,
176–177, 179–180.
37. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 205–209.
38. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 183–184, 187; cf. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 169, 245–250.
39. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 188–189. Cf. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 181–183, 206,
235–240, 298, 306.
40. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 189–190. He distinguishes (191–192) the Rome of the
boy in the 1860s (“an object of hate, an enemy to be conquered”) from that of the man
in the 1890s (“an object of desire, to be entered in love”).
41. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 62, 205–211, 298.
42. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 192–193; see page 192 footnote for parallels between
Winckelmann’s and Freud’s lives.
43. Ibid., 191–193; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 206, 209–211, 228, 309; Boyarin, Unheroic
Conduct, 224–226, 229.
44. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 209–211, 228–229. This is not simply a choice between
insider and outsider: Winckelmann (like Joseph) succeeded, while Hannibal (like the
heroic Jewish defenders of the Temple with whom Freud also identified himself: ibid.,
63; Armstrong, “Freud’s Hannibal,” 246) failed.
45. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 171–172, 185–198, 200, 204, 211–218.
46. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 188. Robert L. Lippman, “Freud’s Botanical Monograph
Screen Memory Revisited,” Psychoanalytic Review 96.4 (August 2009), 579–595. For his
“Revolutionary dream,” see: Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 193–197; McGrath, Freud’s
Discovery, 267–275.
47. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 197.
48. Ibid., 199–200.
49. Salberg, “Hidden,” 211; Jennifer Eastman, “Freud, the Oedipus Complex, and Greece
or the Silence of Athena,” Psychoanalytic Review 92.3 (June 2005), 342–344.
50. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 204.
51. Ibid., 207, 212–213, 228–229, 320–321. Madelon Sprengnether, “Reading Freud’s Life,”
American Imago 52.1 (spring 1995), 9–12, criticizes biographers’ too ready acceptance of
Freud’s self-portrayal.
52. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 186; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 212–213; Toews,
“Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 527–528.
53. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 191–194, 197–198, 205–207, 212, 218–219, 225–229, 233–234,
244, 263–264, 269–270, 275.
54. Ibid., 207.
55. Ibid., 219–229.
56. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 504–545, quoted at 529. For the crisis of liberal-
ism, see 531–535.
57. Ibid., 514–515.
58. Ibid., 515 (quoted), 519, 530–531, 534–535; cf. Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 54–57.
59. Toews, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis,” 513–514.
60. Ibid., 522–523. He does later leave open (albeit somewhat tentatively) the possibility
(forcefully argued by many feminist and other critics) that Freud’s understanding of
sexual difference and female sexuality, in this case and more generally, was shaped by
patriarchal constraints. See Richard Lichtman, The Production of Desire: The Integration
of Psychoanalysis and Marxist Theory (New York: Free Press, 1982), 131–173.
61. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 226, 239 (“Freud was enacting, at the same time that he was
disavowing and denying, the self-contempt of the racially dominated subject”), 241.
62. Ibid., Unheroic Conduct, 208–18; Salberg, “Hidden,” 203.
63. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xiii–xvii, xx–xxi, 2–12, 16–17, 23–26, 37–38, 72–73, 211–212,
239–241 (regarding circumcision).
64. Ibid., 212; Lippman, “Freud’s Botanical Monograph,” 582–583.
65. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 37, 76–78.
66. Ibid., 200–201.
67. Ibid., 201–208; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 78–79, 82, 157–158; David Lotto, “Freud’s
Struggle with Misogyny: Homosexuality and Guilt in the Dream of Irma’s Injection,”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 49.4 (2001), 1289–1313. Shirley
Nelson Garner, “Freud and Fliess: Homophobia and Seduction,” in Dianne Hunter,
ed., Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation and Rhetoric (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1989), 86–109, offers a detailed reading of the relationship.
For Freud’s extensive imagery in the Irma dream of his giving birth to something con-
ceived with Fliess, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 227–228; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body,
79–82, 93.
68. Hence, Boyarin argues (Unheroic Conduct, 38–39), another value for Freud in adopting
the Oedipus story: it grants him a father, Laius, who rather than being forced off the
road stands his ground “like a man”—and dies for it.
69. Ibid., 190–201, 242.
70. Ibid., 221–231. On Herzl’s Zionism as assimilationism and colonial mimicry, see
276–312.
71. Ibid., 19–20, 192–194, 209–210, 239–244, 260–270.
72. Salberg, “Hidden,” 207–208; cf. 205; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 32–33, 87–88; Eastman,
“Freud,” 340–347.
73. Salberg, “Hidden,” 203–204.
46 T. G. Ashplant
74. Ibid., 206, 210.

75. Ibid., 210.
76. Ibid., 215. As she points out (210), the emphasis on female passivity is “the arrange-
ment of his internal object world and not the arrangement in his external family,” or
of the role of women in Orthodox Jewish communities.
77. Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 13–15, cf. 60–61; Laura Gandolfi, “Freud in Trieste: Journey
to an Ambiguous City,” Psychoanalysis and History 12.2 (2010), 140–141.
78. Anti-Semitism “also became the code signalling the suffering of, and solution to, the
myriad problems afflicting German-Austrian society”: Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 51.
79. Ibid., 5–7, 32–33, 44–52, 69.
80. Ibid., 47–48, 50–51, 61. He notes (36, 44, 53–62) that all those slips that Freud in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life explicitly attributes to Jews concern intimate (sexual or
connubial) relationships between Jews and Gentiles. Sexual relating or intermarriage,
a potential source of pleasure, is so threatening to the identity of each community
that it provokes the anxiety that leaks out in symptomatic errors. Austrian law forbade
Christian-Jewish intermarriage unless one partner converted (52).
81. Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 5–10, 32, 69, 74–77, 98. Cf. n.62 earlier.
82. Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 2–5, 113–114; cf. 129–130.
83. Geller is concerned with being circumcised not as a literal state, but as what he terms a
dispositive in the Central European imagination of the period, which links together all
the elements of Jewishness (ibid., 11, 31). Cf. his discussion (127) of the (ir)relevance of
the fact that “Little Hans” had almost certainly not been circumcised.
84. Ibid., 35.
85. The cutting off of the penis replacing the usual meaning of removing the testicles:
Ibid., 223 n.75, 266 n.10.
86. Ibid., 111–112.
87. Ibid., 15.
88. Ibid., 160–161, following Charles Bernheimer, wishes to deconstruct Freud’s manoeu-
vre Whereas Freud deployed his theory of the castration complex to imply that all men
are like Jewish men, they suggest that the theory, with its “allegedly shared phantasy
of an originary universal maleness that half of humanity lose and the other half fear
to lose” itself serves as a fetish against the recognition of gender difference.
89. In particular, the omission of mention of either his own or his patients’ Jewishness,
even when this may have been relevant to understanding their experiences.
90. For how this was played out in the relationship with Fliess, and the Irma dream, which
expressed his anxieties about his potential feminization, see: ibid., 78–79, 82, 90–94.
91. Ibid., 12. Freud was an ordinary Viennese, but “one making extraordinary attempts to
mitigate the trauma of everyday antisemitism” (16–17, quoted at 17).
92. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 243–244, 260–261.
93. John Brenkman, Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1993), 86–99.
94. It was Freud’s determination to convince Ida Bauer that her desire preceded her seduc-
tion and thereby prove his own case, which shaped aspects of his treatment of her:
ibid., 99–101.
95. Ibid., 27 (quoted), 73, 119.
96. Ibid., 49–85. Jacques Lacan, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly
48.3 (1979), 405–425; Lacan’s reworking of the Oedipus complex is lucidly expounded,
and contextualized, by John Forrester, Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 110–135.
97. Brenkman, Straight Male Modern, 105. His real name was Ernst Lanzer; Brenkman uses
the Standard Edition’s pseudonym, “Paul Lorenz.”
98. Ibid., 102–108. Freud’s liking for Lanzer leads him to a countertransferential identifica-
tion with this aggressive male sexuality not unlike that with Herr K in the Dora case
(107); Patrick J. Mahony, Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1986), 95–96.
99. Sprengnether, “Reading Freud’s Life,” 27–46; Eastman, “Freud,” 339–344.

100. Brenkman, Straight Male Modern, 129–134.
101. As well as the growing conflicts between the dominant German speakers and the
rising minority nationalities (and the exclusion of the working class), the position of
Jews as equal citizens was also being challenged.
102. Freud’s concern in the 1890s about his ability to support his growing family, and its
impact on his sexual life, was shaped in part by the anti-Semitic delay to his professor-
ship.
103. Brenkman, Straight Male Modern, 135 (quoted).
104. While the dominant interpretation has seen Freud’s identification with Hannibal as
a rejection of his father, Armstrong (“Freud’s Hannibal,” 238–239) points out that the
story of Hannibal’s oath is about solidarity across generations—a father’s and son’s
devotion to each other and to their common cause. Its attraction for Freud can then be
read as lying in its ambiguity—replacing Jakob while at the same time ennobling him
(as Hannibal’s father, in a version of the family romance), thus enabling Freud to share
his father’s mandate, while interpreting it in his own terms.
105. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 244–270; Geller, Freud’s Jewish Body, 184–209; Stephen Frosh,
Hate and the “Jewish Science”: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
106. Ashplant, Fractured Loyalties, 173–181.
3
The Narcissistic Homosexual:
Genealogy of a Myth
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Among the many character traits associated with narcissism, perhaps none
has proven more central and enduring than self-love. The Narcissus of clas-
sical mythology has long served in the Western tradition as an object lesson
in the dangers of excessive love of self, and it is thus not surprising that the
psychological use of “narcissism” from the start connoted an all-enveloping,
pathological vanity and taste for self-admiration alongside what quickly
would become its more technical referents. The sexologist Havelock Ellis,
who is usually credited with having coined “narcissism” in 1898, used the
term in reference both to a sexual perversion and to a state of absorbing con-
templation and admiration of self.1 Freud, in perhaps the first recorded ana-
lytic discussion of narcissism, in 1909, explained to his Viennese colleagues
that the narcissism on display in “being enamoured of oneself”—and, he
added, parenthetically, “of one’s own genitals”—was normal, a necessary and
“indispensable stage of development.”2 And his fellow analyst Otto Rank pub-
lished a paper in 1911 in which narcissism was treated as first and foremost
love of self.3
No one was more guilty of self-love in the minds of the first psychoanalysts
than the homosexual, and narcissism was in consequence from the moment
of its analytic debut until well into the 1970s inextricably intertwined with
homosexuality. Not all narcissists were thought to be homosexual, but it
was long an analytic and popular commonplace that all homosexuals were
by definition narcissists.4 This was so in the most concrete of terms: narcis-
sism (self-love) was seen as a form of autoerotism (sexual self-love) and, as
another colleague of Freud’s once put it in an unchallenged non sequitur,
“intensive autoerotism must lead to homosexuality.”5 In discussing homosex-
uality, analysts were literalists, seeing only sameness and habitually collapsing
any distinctions between self and other. The intertwining of narcissism and
49
50 Elizabeth Lunbeck
homosexuality is only at its most superficial found in representations of the

gay male as vain, selfish, and self-absorbed. Rather, it derives from—and is
completely consistent with—the construal by Freud and his colleagues of the
homosexual as incapable of relating to objects.
This chapter examines the origins of this analytic truism in Freud’s
“Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” in which he first dis-
cussed narcissism in print and, fatefully, wove together the male homosexual’s
narcissistic love of self on the one hand with an incapacity for relationship
on the other.6 It then briefly traces the post-Freudian analytic and popu-
lar genealogy of the homosexual narcissist, arguing that if Freud’s legacy on
homosexuality is mixed, on the issue of the homosexual-as-narcissist there
is no getting around the fact it was uniformly negative and, until the 1970s,
hegemonic within the analytic realm.7
* * *
Freud first adumbrated the opposition between love of self and love of the
other in his Leonardo essay. There he famously invoked narcissism to explain
what he characterized as the homosexual’s preference for sameness over dif-
ference in his choice of love object, noting that the psychic roots of homo-
sexuality were to be found in a surfeit of maternal tenderness combined with
a deficient paternal presence. The growing boy’s “very intense erotic attach-
ment” to his mother, first nurtured by too much tenderness, which was then
of necessity repressed, survived in his identification with her. Putting “him-
self in her place,” he was fated to seek love objects whom he could love as his
mother had once loved him. The “correct decision” thus forsworn (that is, to
love someone of the opposite sex), the boy, Freud explained, “has become a
homosexual.” Choosing autoeroticism over object love, from that point on he
traveled “the path of narcissism.”8
Freud thus saw narcissism on the one hand and homosexuality and unwar-
ranted feminine leverage on the other as part of the same nexus of pathology
and deviation. He had long been interested in Leonardo, and, notably, in
Leonardo’s homosexuality, in a letter to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess in 1898
offhandedly observing of the artist that “no love affair of his is known.”9 He
read widely in the Leonardo literature, through the years purchasing and
poring over biographies, with the Russian novelist D. S. Merezhkovsky’s bio-
graphical study—which, interestingly, was the only one in which Freud could
find any trace of Leonardo’s elusive mother—appearing in 1907 on a list of
books he’d most enjoyed reading.10 By the autumn of 1909, the subject had,
by his own telling, become Freud’s obsession.11 The riddle of Leonardo’s char-
acter suddenly clear to him,12 he embarked on his study with an intensity
that his biographer and fellow analyst Ernest Jones thought exceptional,13 a
judgment amply documented in Freud’s ongoing correspondence with his
male intimates. For months, his thoughts were with little else. Writerly tra-
vails ensued. A lecture on Leonardo in December to his Viennese colleagues
left him exasperated and dissatisfied, despite the fulsome praise it elicited.14
The Narcissistic Homosexual 51
Constant “gnawing at Leonardo” yielded “not a line.”15 A week later, it was

“still proceeding with great difficulty.”16 Again, a dry spell, with “not a line
on Leonardo for weeks.”17 Then, quickly, the pages began to mount. First,
10 pages.18 Then, “an attack of writing frenzy” brought the count to 30.19
Another week of “writing every free hour” and he had 40 pages in hand.20
There were patients to see and professional disputes to manage but, Freud
wrote to Carl Jung in early March, “otherwise I am all Leonardo.”21 Within
several more weeks the essay was in press, published in May 1910. The first
“psychoanalytic pathography”—the encomium is Sándor Ferenczi’s, who pre-
dicted in an idealizing flourish it would “serve as a model for all time”22 —the
work would prove to be Freud’s favorite, in his words “the only truly beautiful
thing I have ever written.”23
It was also, in Ernest Jones’s estimation, in many respects an autobiography,
informed by issues that had arisen in Freud’s self-analysis and, as such, offer-
ing a window onto his personality.24 Jones found it suggestive that Leonardo’s
“passion for natural knowledge” was akin to Freud’s own; that the essay,
which “illuminated the inner nature of that great man,” located the source
of his conflicts, which Jones framed as between a passion for artistic creation
and a passion for science, in “the events of his earliest childhood.”25 Freud
himself stressed that it was infantile sexuality that held the key to the artist’s
character; the riddle unraveled, its constitutive threads—the child’s stymied
quest for knowledge, homosexuality, mother-love, and artistic creation—were
opened to analysis. Leonardo, Freud wrote to Jung as he embarked on his
study, was a man who “converted his sexuality into an urge for knowledge.”
Heaping non sequitur upon non sequitur, Freud pointed out that Leonardo,
“sexually inactive or homosexual,” was from “an early age” never able to
bring any project to completion.26 However, missing both from Jones’s con-
strual of Leonardo as thinly veiled autobiography and from Freud’s focus on
the infantile roots of the artist’s homosexuality is any account of Freud’s
contemporaneous struggles with, and panicked disavowal of, his own homo-
sexual currents. Freud’s conflicts over what he called “my homosexuality”—
and over-mutuality and dependence, which he consistently interpreted as
feminine—bubbled beneath the surface as he wrote the essay, and reached a
crisis late in the summer of 1910 in a dramatic confrontation with his disciple
Ferenczi that occurred while the two were on holiday together in Palermo,
on the island of Sicily. Freud interpreted his own psychology at this point,
having finished his Leonardo and embarking on the case of the paranoid
and homosexual Judge Schreber, in terms of triumph and mastery—of the
homosexual feelings with which he’d struggled since the end of his relation-
ship with Fliess, the Berlin physician with whom he’d carried on an intensely
intimate correspondence in the 1890s. Although various commentators have
followed Jones in seeing aspects of Freud’s self-understanding mirrored in
his presentation of Leonardo, they have for the most part focused on his
identification with the artist as scientific genius; only Peter Gay has gone so
far as to locate the “secret energy” animating Freud’s obsession with the work
in his memories of—his “unconscious homoerotic feelings” toward—his old
intimate Fliess,27 thus speaking for us moderns of the love that Freud had no
compunction naming in his private correspondence.
* * *
What little was known to Freud of Leonardo’s childhood may be briefly

stated. The artist was born the illegitimate son of a notary and a poor peasant
girl, Caterina, in the town of Vinci, near Florence in 1452. That same year, his
father married Donna Albieri, “a lady of good birth” who would bear no chil-
dren of her own. Sometime before the age of five, the boy was moved to his
father’s household, remaining there until he was apprenticed to the painter
Andrea del Verrocchio. Caterina would marry a local man, and all traces of
her would vanish from the record of Leonardo’s life; his father would marry
again twice, fathering 11 more children. Most tantalizing to Freud, Leonardo
would later record as among his earliest memories that while in his cradle a
bird—a kite, mistakenly rendered as a vulture in the German translations
Freud consulted—had swooped down on him and had, he wrote, “opened my
mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.”28
On this admittedly meager scaffolding, Freud constructed an imaginative
and, in the estimation of many, persuasive account of Leonardo’s perplexing
personality—chiefly, of his homosexuality, which in the days of his appren-
ticeship had been the grounds for a charge of forbidden practices brought
against him, of which he was acquitted, and which was later evident in his
surrounding himself “with handsome boys and youths whom he took as
pupils.” Inhibited and repressed, Leonardo never enjoyed what Freud called
“a real sexual life.” He was, rather, “emotionally homosexual.”29
Freud explained Leonardo’s homosexuality via a virtuoso if highly spec-
ulative reading of the childhood memory of the kite—which he reclassi-
fied as a passive homosexual fantasy of taking the penis in the mouth and
sucking on it—that took readers on a wild ride from Richard Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis to a discussion of the mother in Egyptian hieroglyphics
to the vulture-headed Mother Goddess in the culture’s mythology. Even more
significant in Freud’s estimation was that in ancient natural histories the vul-
ture was a female creature, impregnated only by the wind. Freud confidently
concluded that Leonardo, the fatherless vulture child, had transformed
pleasurable memories of being nursed by his mother into the unmistakably
homosexual fantasy of taking the vulture’s penis-tail in his mouth. Then,
admitting to being “completely ignorant” of the age at which Leonardo actu-
ally exchanged “his poor, forsaken, real mother” for life with “a parental cou-
ple,” Freud went on to argue that “it fits in best with the interpretation of
the vulture phantasy” he had offered if that age were to be set at three at the
least, five at the most. That early experiences were determinative of lifelong
patterns underwrote his favoring the later age, as did the fact that paternal
absence figured so centrally in the histories of his and his colleagues’ homo-
sexual patients. Further, contended Freud, surely only “years of disappoint-
ment” would have persuaded the barren Donna Albieri to have accepted the
illegitimately born boy into her household as her own; it would have been
highly unusual for her to have adopted him earlier. QED: Leonardo was raised
by his birth mother, and—like legions of homosexuals subjected to analytic
scrutiny since—deformed by her attentions, in Freud’s words robbed “of a
part of his masculinity.”30
Freud’s speculations as to the origins of homosexuality have proven endur-
ing, despite the illogic of his argumentation, the fact that the entire edifice of
explanation organized around an excess of maternal solicitude rested on the
weak foundation of “it fits in best.” Peter Gay has pointed out that Freud had
owned and annotated a French work on Leonardo in which it was argued that
the artist’s father had taken him into his own household the same year he
married, the year of Leonardo’s birth—evidence, ignored by Freud, that would
have completely undercut his central argument about the genesis of Leonardo’s
homosexuality. Freud also ignored critics who as early as 1923 pointed out that
in relying on several flawed German translations from the Italian and Russian,
he had mistaken Leonardo’s ordinary bird for the redoubtable vulture on which
so much of his argument about homosexual passivity rested, never returning
to the work to correct his error.31 Freud’s focus throughout the work was on
Leonardo’s fantasy productions, and his own interpretations have a fantastical
quality, impervious as they are to contrary evidence, defended as they are at all
cost, “true” largely because they make inner sense. Freud admitted to writing
his Leonardo in the guise of “the psychological novelist,” guided by the “inner
probability” of his speculations,32 and we might do well to take him at his word.
That is, instead of worrying the question, as so many psychoanalysts have,33 of
how deeply flawed his substitution of one sort of bird for another renders the
work, we might instead bracket the question of right and wrong and instead
treat Leonardo as a richly imagined textual production— echt psychoanalytic
in that, as has been pointed out, in writing it Freud deployed empathic identi-
fication and introspection as a means to understanding.34
Let us start, then, with Freud’s handling of Leonardo’s relationship with his
mother—or, more to the point, mothers. For, as Freud underscored midway
into his essay, Leonardo had “two mothers”: Caterina, his “true mother . . . from
whom he was torn away,” and Donna Albiera, “a young and tender step-mother.”
Force and envy—that is, Caterina’s envy of her “better-born rival” to whom she
“was forced to give up her son”—here characterize what Freud otherwise treated
as a straightforward and eminently sensible transaction, akin to an open adop-
tion or surrogacy arrangement, even noting at one point that Leonardo’s step-
mother “must certainly have taken his mother’s place where his feelings were
concerned.”35 But were the mothers really so interchangeable? Freud had earlier
presented evidence suggesting the answer might be negative, telling some of
his Viennese colleagues, at one of their regular Wednesday evening meetings,
what he had read in the novel by Merezhkovsky of the six- to eight-year-old
Leonardo escaping at night from his father’s estate to visit his mother’s hut,
to “slip into bed beside her, nestle against her and tell her everything he did
during the day.” Freud noted that while this represented a speculation on
the novelist’s part, it coincided “very closely with our investigations.” In the
discussion that followed Freud’s presentation, only Victor Tausk among all the
analysts present—17 all told, including the regulars Alfred Adler, Otto Rank,
Isidor Sadger, and Wilhelm Stekel—picked up on this scene of maternal tender-
ness and youthful desire, adding that there was “a passage in his diary where
Leonardo directly speaks of his great love for his mother.”36 No one—not even
Freud himself, who highlighted the way that the young Leonardo’s recounting
his days’ exploits foreshadowed a lifetime of diary-keeping—registered what
Freud had already called “the trauma of separation,” and no one remarked on
the mutual longing so evident in the scene, in which was captured “one of the
forms of attainable human happiness” that Freud saw in the mother-child love
relationship here so brutally disrupted.37
It would not be entirely anachronistic to read Freud’s Leonardo in the reg-
ister of trauma. Indeed, the analyst Jorge Ahumada has suggested that the
identification with the mother—which is termed narcissistic at this point—
that Freud described as a step on the path to homosexuality is, by Freud’s
own account, preceded by loss and rupture; that is, the motive force behind
the identification, otherwise so pathological and inexplicable, can only be
located in trauma.38 The boy identifies with his mother in order to hold on
to her. The “bliss and rapture” enjoyed mutually by mother and infant was,
Freud suggested, “in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation,” ful-
filling at once mental wish and physical need—so satisfying that even in
happy families fathers see their sons as rivals for womanly attentions, calling
forth a deep-rooted antagonism against their male offspring and suggesting it
was not only the child who was to master his Oedipal feelings.39 The suckling
child at the maternal breast, Freud had written five years earlier, was “the pro-
totype of every relation of love.”40 The mutually enjoyed “erotic bliss” on dis-
play in this “first and most significant of all sexual relations” between mother
and child was, in the normal developmental sequence, inevitably succeeded
by loss in the process of weaning and its sequelae, culminating in the Oedipal
moment of renunciation of childish things. It was a species of satisfaction that
Freud believed was never again to be attained.41
Trauma and loss were, then, even in the best of cases, developmentally prior
to what Freud would later, in 1914, theorize as a state of primary narcissism
or sovereign solitariness. In 1910, in Leonardo’s case, what might be called
a primary symbiosis was the starting point. Freud held that everyone—or,
more precisely, all men, those who would turn out homosexual as well as
their heterosexual brethren—eventually repressed their mother attachments.
The latter, subjected to paternal authority and Oedipal terror, identified with
their fathers and entered the company of civilized men, while the former—
prompted by motive forces Freud argued were not yet understood—identified
with their mothers and, as noted earlier, put themselves in their mothers’
place, fated forever to love boys as their mothers had loved them, forever
faithful to their mothers in running away from erotic engagements with
other women.42
These murky forces that precede the boy’s narcissistic identification with
his mother might best be interpreted, within the terms of Freud’s evolving
oeuvre, as traumatic in nature, linked as they are to the boy’s having to repress
or abandon his love for the mother. Freud’s theorizing manifestly held that
too much maternal care lay at the root of homosexuality. But the threads of
a contrary argument run through his Leonardo. This argument, which his
rhetorical maneuvering can barely contain, would assert that it was too little,
not too much, maternal tenderness that sealed Leonardo’s fate.
Maternal attention, in the Freud of these years, was a double-edged sword.
He could conceive of it on the one hand as blissfully erotic and completely
satisfying, a foundation for worldly success in later life—those fortunate
enough to grow up as their mother’s favorites were endowed with an enviable
if “peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism” that could appear
as indubitably masculine “heroic attributes.”43 But on the other hand in his
Leonardo he described the “violence” of the maternal caress, the menace of the
single mother’s “tender seductions,” the “excessive tenderness” visited on the
hapless son by the mother-without-a-mate. Starved for a husband’s caresses,
the “poor forsaken” Caterina, “like all unsatisfied mothers, . . . took her little
son in place of her husband,” with this move determining “his destiny and
the privations that were in store for him.” In so doing, she was at once com-
pensating the little Leonardo for “having no father to fondle him” and, Freud
writes, in a scenario that to modern sensibilities veers close to abuse that one
commentator calls “covert seduction,” attempting to satisfy her own unmet
longings. Leonardo’s eroticism awakened too early, he was robbed “of a part
of his masculinity.”44 Freud ventured that the picture of the Mona Lisa later
painted by Leonardo represented for him a “glorification of motherhood,”
the unfathomable smile he gave her, which signaled at once “unbounded
tenderness” and “sinister menace,” expressing the double meanings of moth-
erhood that characterized the artist’s childhood.45 Later in the essay, Freud
pointed out that Leonardo “escaped being intimidated by his father during
his earliest childhood”—a striking formation of the Oedipal tension between
maternal solicitude and paternal authority.46 Surely it is significant that until
the very end of the Leonardo essay Freud—perhaps defensively—was seeing
menace only on the side of the mother. This, despite the fact that his Oedipal
model of the boy’s development held that paternal intimidation was all that
could rescue the boy for civilization, dangerously wallowing as Leonardo was
in what Freud would only much later—after more than 20 years, in fact—
construe as the halcyon state of pre-Oedipal mutuality and bliss.
Fair enough. That it took intimidation—or, as Freud so graphically and
violently construed it, the threat of castration—to bring the boy into a man’s
world only underscored how satisfying a woman’s world really was. Freud
took note of “how slowly anyone tears himself from his childhood if in his
childhood days he has enjoyed the highest erotic bliss, which is never again
attained.”47 In light of this, as well as the fact that Freud could conceive of
maternal attention as the crucible from which indisputably masculine—even
heroic—dispositions might be developed, it is all the more puzzling that he
saw Leonardo deformed by too much, not too little, mother-love. His col-
league Sadger, in a presentation to the Wednesday Society in November 1909,
argued the contrary case, suggesting that maternal absence, “the elimination
of the mother” or of her love from the boy’s life, might predispose him to
homosexuality—elimination as a consequence, for example, of her death,
or on account of a disfiguring illness or financial catastrophe. Deprived of
her love, the boy might identify with her and “play the part of the mother”
toward younger boys. Freud picked up on the scenario of trauma-induced
narcissistic identification Sadger adumbrated in his lecture in articulating his
own theory of homosexual etiology, but he completely ignored the trauma
of separation, in effect picking up instead on Sadger’s mention, among causal
factors, of “the fact of being brought up a long time in female company.”48 In
May of same year, he had worried aloud about the issue of the mother from
whom one could not detach.49
Freud’s construal of mother love as menace in his Leonardo is striking
indeed, especially because it was at this time that he was first giving name to
the theory—the Oedipal theory was named as such in 1910—that highlights
the father as the intimidating and menacing side of the parental couple. His
biographers give us a Freud passionately if unconsciously tied to his mother,
a man who at age 75 could characterize himself the “the first-born son of
a youthful mother” in whom, deep within, lived on “the happy child” of
his earliest days.50 There is, however, evidence enough to suggest that these
words, spoken at a ceremony commemorating his natal home—in Freiberg in
1856, by 1931 known as Příbor, in Czechoslovakia—by the town fathers, are
but the public face of a far more conflicted relationship with his mother, an
idealized reconstruction of a childhood that was marked by maternal absence
and loss, words uttered even as he was formulating his theory of femininity
in a series of papers in which the youthful girl’s—never the boy’s—hostility
to the mother was highlighted. That is, while Freud could manifestly char-
acterize the relationship of mother and son as pure, untainted by aggres-
sion or egoistic considerations, when he finally did turn to examining the
mother-daughter relationship he had little trouble proposing that the mother,
in bringing into the family a younger rival, deprived the firstborn of mater-
nal care and attention.51 There is much in Freud’s writings to suggest that
loss more than happy fulfillment characterized his own early years. Further,
scattered through his correspondence and published papers are testimoni-
als to the strong feelings that losses such as he experienced might induce.
Like the girl child of his essay “Femininity,” which appeared in 1933, the
infant Freud was “dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights” by the birth
of a younger brother when he was 11 months old.52 To Fliess, in the mid-
dle of his self-analysis, Freud wrote that “adverse wishes and genuine child-
hood jealousy” greeted this rival, named Julius, who then died at six or eight
months of age, giving rise, Freud continued, to “the germ of [self-] reproaches
in me.”53 Freud elsewhere—in his essay on Goethe, who also lost a younger
brother but who, according to scholars cited by Freud, shed not a tear at his
death—registered the bitterness and anger of the child displaced by a sibling.
His brother dead and out of the way, Goethe was by Freud’s telling his mother’s
“undisputed darling,” his strength rooted in his relationship with her.54 And,
like Leonardo, Freud had two mothers, his birth mother and his beloved
nursemaid, “an old woman who provided me at such an early age with the
means for living and going on living,” who disappeared from his life when
he was around two, charged with theft of property from the Freud house-
hold, imprisoned and never seen by Freud again.55 Among Freud’s childhood
memories was a scene of his “crying in despair” at the imagined loss of his
mother, whom the young Sigmund feared had “vanished” from him just like
the old woman who “disappeared from my life so suddenly.”56 Finally, as an
adult, Freud in 1896 welcomed his widowed sister-in-law Minna Bernays into
the household, where she remained until her death in 1941, thus replicating
a familiar domestic scenario, with Martha and Minna—“the two mothers”
he called them in 1912—filling the symbolic shoes of his own mother and
his nursemaid.57 Further, as has been long suspected, it is now commonly
accepted that Freud at some point took Minna as his mistress, enacting a
pointed Oedipal scenario under his own roof.58
The Freud who off and on had remembered his younger self crying in
despair at his mother’s disappearance was the Freud who lighted on the scene
of Leonardo nestling in bed with his mother who, it is likely, like Freud’s
nursemaid, had suddenly vanished from the young artist’s life. In both
life and work, early childhood longing, abandonment, and maternal loss
are recorded but neither discussed nor pursued, Freud being disinclined to
explore any of them.59 Freud narrated Leonardo’s childish dependency on
his mother, but he did not interpret it. Having painted the scene of cozy
nestling, he immediately switched registers to talk of the artist’s capacity for
self-mastery. Likewise, having confided to Fliess memories of his own child-
ish dependency on his mother and despair at her loss, he abruptly—in the
same letter—changed the topic to announce the universal principle of the
Oedipal desire—transforming himself into an adult, his mother’s putative
lover. No longer the helpless child, he would be his father’s rival in the bed-
room. Freud at this moment interpreted his own childhood emotions in the
terms of adult passions, just as he was often wont to relegate unwanted adult
emotions to childhood.60
It is too much mothering that consistently drew Freud’s attention and cen-
sure. He could see the mother as font of tenderness and he could, as in his
essay on Goethe, construe the mother as a source of masculine strength. Yet
Freud in Leonardo, which figured centrally in analytic discussions of male
homosexuality for more than half a century following its publication, cast
the mother—not the father—as the real menace to the boy. He cast Woman
in opposition to civilization, a masculine enterprise held together by “social
feelings . . . of a homosexual nature,” suggesting to his colleagues in 1912 that
she rendered man asocial, representing as she did both unbridled nature and
what he later specified as the “retarding and restraining” interests of the fam-
ily and sexual life.61 François Roustang has written of an “idealized maternal
matrix” animating Freud’s writings,62 but he and others have overlooked the
degree to which a menacing, seductive mother—who, longing for the caress
of a man, “like all unsatisfied mothers,” takes “her little son in place of her
husband, and by the too early maturing of his eroticism rob[s] him of a part
of his masculinity”—coexists alongside the pure and tender mother in his
theoretical writings.63 This mother, Freud and his colleagues held, was in
many cases a masculine woman “able to push the father out of his proper
place.”64 Freud normalized paternal aggression in putting it front and center
of the Oedipus complex. The deformations of maternity he could only see as
exceptional, first as visited on the homosexual boy then later, in his essay on
femininity, on the girl. The germ of the overbearing Mom of mid-century
American analysis and popular criticism, who in her ministrations spawned a
generation of homosexual sissies, can be glimpsed in the sometimes-terrifying
pre-Oedipal Caterina.
* * *
Accounting for the origins of homosexuality and identifying the laws that gov-
erned its emergence were major preoccupations of Freud and his colleagues.
Freud was famously tolerant of homosexuals, holding that they were not sick
persons and that homosexuality was, as he wrote in 1935 to an American
mother concerned about her son’s sexuality, neither vice nor degradation. In
1921, he opposed Jones in backing the suitability of admitting a “manifest
homosexual” to the British Psychoanalytic Society, and he was throughout
his career opposed to the legal prosecution of homosexuals, signing a petition
in 1930 favoring the decriminalization of homosexual activity.65 Freud and
his colleagues held that, as one put it, “homosexual ideas are to be found in
everyone,66 or as Freud himself wrote in his Three Essays, “all human beings
are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one
in their unconscious.”67 Analysts’ offhanded comments on homosexuals—
noting, for example, that they could be “extremely happy”—testify to a broad
curiosity about a phenomenon they were for the most part unwilling to con-
demn outright. Some of their comments verge on the comic, for example,
the observation that homosexuality was so prevalent in Berlin “because the
Prussian woman is very prudish and therefore unattractive; the men are more
dashing.”68 And, to be sure, they could see a homosexual component in just
about anything or anyone: in alcoholism and in suicide (“the last attempt
to perform a masculine deed”), in philosophers and in philologists, and in a
taste for all things ancient, from art to historical costumes.69 Homosexuals,
as one analyst saw it, singly “as well as in groups . . . have accomplished great
things,” a line of argument consonant with Freud’s repeatedly voiced convic-
tion that homosexuals were to be found in the ranks of the greatest of men,
“Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo.”70
The historical verdict on the question, as framed by the historian Paul
Robinson, “has Freud been good or bad for homosexuals” is decidedly mixed,
the subject of continuing debate and controversy. Freud’s public statements
on homosexuality were, as Robinson notes, astonishingly evenhanded, and
his writings more than any others transformed heterosexuality from a given
into a “precarious psychological achievement.”71 Yet the relationship between
psychoanalysis and homosexuality has, until quite recently, been charac-

terized by acrimony and enmity, with analytic pronouncements regularly
mobilized in support of discriminatory policies and woven into derogatory
popular portrayals.72
This is especially the case around narcissism. As I suggested in the intro-
duction to this chapter, from the start—that is, from the analytic debut of
narcissism, roughly coincident with the publication of Freud’s Leonardo —
narcissism and homosexuality have been inextricably linked. It has long
been an analytic and popular commonplace that all male homosexuals are
by definition narcissists, a commonplace consistent with Freud’s construal
of the homosexual as incapable of relating to objects. The genealogy of this
incapacity, which has shadowed the figure of the homosexual for years, is
worth rehearsing in some detail here.
Recall that for the Freud of Leonardo, the boy becomes a homosexual in
repressing his love of his mother and then identifying with her—putting
“himself in her place”—and in taking “his own person as a model in whose
likeness he chooses the new objects of his love.” His choice betrays a fun-
damentally autoerotic disposition, Freud writes, in that those he loves “are
after all only substitutive figures and revivals” of his childhood self, “boys
whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a
child.” Freud in a triumphant flourish then invoked the legendary Narcissus,
“a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else,” sealing the
analytic association between homosexuality—love of oneself—and narcis-
sism. This association is, however, premised on an ambiguity in the text,
for Freud confusingly construes the homosexual-in-the-making as at once
capable and incapable of object love. Capable in his choice of those other
boys, “objects of his love”; utterly incapable in that his choice was but evi-
dence of his slipping “back to auto-erotism,” which Freud explained earlier
was a term he used “when there is no object.”73 Despite analysts’ interest
in the social landscape of homosexuality, both ancient and contemporary,
and despite their interest in exploring the inner landscapes of historical, fic-
tional, and, in the persons of those whom they saw in their consulting rooms,
in-the-flesh homosexuals—despite, that is, their knowledge of the vast array
of homosexual practices and personalities, they, like Freud, could theorize
only sameness, not difference, when it came to homosexual object choice. To
Freud and his colleagues, morphological similitude trumped any possible dif-
ferences among men—of personality, of appearance, of class, of upbringing—
such that the improbable hypothesis that homosexual love for another was
but love of self, like masturbation literally autoerotic, found easy acceptance.
As Freud’s American translator Abraham Brill summed up the association in
1913, giving voice to an emerging orthodoxy, “[T]he road to homosexuality
always passes over narcissism, that is, love for one’s self.”74
Freud had been trying out variations on this theme of the homosexual
incapacity for relationship in conversations with his colleagues for going
on two years by the time he wrote his Leonardo essay. Reporting to his col-
leagues in the Wednesday Society on a case of latent homosexuality in 1908,
he highlighted the boy’s suppression of mother-love but didn’t mention the

compensatory identification he would later hypothesize followed in its wake.
Rather, Freud’s complex narrative started with the patient, who had “always
preferred boys,” turning against them in “jealousy and hate” because his
mother, toward whom he harbored tender feelings, praised other young men
in his presence “for their physical and mental superiority.” His rage against
the other boys, Freud held, was transformed—apparently redundantly, given
his lifelong preferences—into “a liking for them.”75 A year later, Freud brought
identification with the mother into the same scenario, which still turned on
the same improbable transformation of hate into homosexual love.76 Conflict
with actual others, not retreat into solipsistic self-absorption, characterizes the
mechanism of homosexual character formation adumbrated in these instances,
in which liking—even love of—other boys or men figures centrally.
Sadger was the first to bring narcissism, homosexuality, and identifica-
tion with the mother within the same compass, suggesting in a meeting in
November 1909—a time when Freud was by his own telling obsessed with
Leonardo—that for homosexuality to develop something had to happen to
take “the mother out of the picture” before going on to propose that every-
one, homosexual and heterosexual, sought aspects of themselves in others
“in addition to the characteristics of the individuals who are loved.” Sadger
suggested that “autoerotism in the form of narcissism” accounted for this
fact, presumably applicable to heterosexual and homosexual alike, adducing
as evidence the case of a man fated by his identification with his lost mother
to love men similar to the sort of man that he had been at the moment of rup-
ture from the maternal presence; that is, to put himself in his mother’s place
in loving “himself.” Freud found Sadger’s hypothesis of homosexual forma-
tion by way of identification with the mother “absolutely correct,” although
he ignored then and in his own subsequent theorizing—in Leonardo, for
example—the trauma of loss that in Sadger’s schematic preceded it. And he
found Sadger’s comment about narcissism “new and valuable,” maintaining
it was a normal, even indispensable, stage through which everyone passed. In
this developmental telos, autoerotic love of self was superseded by narcissistic
love of “similar objects” culminating in the embrace of mature, heterosexual
object love. Freud’s texts and statements oscillate between characterizations
of the homosexual as capable of—indeed, defined by—loving others of his
sex on the one hand and as utterly incapacitated for love by solipsistic devo-
tion to a former self on the other. Freud observed homosexuals seeking to
relate to others, pursuing boys and seeking to be lovers, but the logic of his
argument ensured that he would theorize—and make literal—only the same-
ness in such relations despite his observations and his consistently allowing
that there were many types of homosexuality.77
This is not the only paradox at work in Freudian thinking on homosexu-
ality. Freud’s argument that homosexuality consists in a relation to oneself
instead of to another was sharply at odds with the developing analytic tru-
ism that homosexuality lay at the root of all social life. Psychoanalysts spoke
with one voice on this issue, with Jung, for example, seeing tremendous
advantages in homosexuality, suited as it was to “large agglomerations of

males (businesses, universities, etc.),”78 and Ferenczi seeing it operative “in
friendship leagues, in club life, etc.”79 In fact, Freud suggested, homosexuals
were perhaps better suited than heterosexuals to social life, for while the lat-
ter competed with their peers for women, the former had early on overcome
their rivalrous impulses toward their fellows. A colleague, for example, might
be thought “agreeable” on account of “his well-sublimated homosexuality.”80
Heterosexuality was fueled by exclusive and private interests, while public
and communal interests were consonant with homosexuality.81 Invoking
what was apparently common wisdom, Freud maintained that highly devel-
oped “social instinctual impulses” were to be found in many homosexuals,
characterized by “their devotion to the interests of the community.” He later
elaborated on this, arguing that as “love for women” disrupted the bonds of
race, nationality, and social class, homosexual love was “far more compat-
ible with group ties,” even, remarkably, “when it takes the shape of uninhib-
ited sexual impulsions.”82 In fact, social feeling was premised on sublimated
homosexuality, which made for good collegial relations.83 Woman, more
than the homosexual, was the disruptive force in social life.
Ferenczi worried the issue of homoerotism, a term he preferred to homo-
sexuality in its foregrounding of the psychical over the biological, taking the
measure of how much had been lost in men’s abjuring of “mutual affection
and amiability,” the enthusiasms of male friendship that the ancients had
so unselfconsciously enjoyed. He could see around him but slight traces of
what had once been a robust connection among men, in its positive instan-
tiations in “club and party life” and negatively in the “barbarous duels of
the German students”—none of which could compensate men “for losing
the love of friends.” Instead, as he saw it, men displaced their unappeased
homoerotism onto women. “Obsessively heterosexual,” they became “the
slaves of women” as the price of freeing themselves from men, unnaturally
chivalrous and idolatrous in their relations with women. Why should man
adore women, Ferenczi asked. Repression of men’s natural affection for one
another was doomed to fail, however; was not the increasing number of
homosexuals symptomatic of the “partial failure of repression and ‘return’
of the repressed?” Ferenczi, perhaps our first theorist of heteronormativity,
argued that repression of homoerotism produced “obsessive reinforcement of
hetero-erotism in men.”84 He saw the same dynamic in himself. Discussing
what he called his “homosexual fixation,” he explained to Freud that there
was in him “a woman and only behind her [is] the real man,” his own hetero-
sexuality “a reaction formation against homosexuality.”85
* * *
The ubiquity and even the necessity of homosexuality was thus common
coin among early analysts. From the perspective of the London-based analyst
J. C. Flügel, who introduced the terms “homosocial” and “heterosocial” in a
1927 publication, this was in the nature of common sense, with “a man who
falls in love . . . obviously less gregarious” with his fellows. As an analytic col-
league summarized Flügel’s argument: “Social relationship between members
of the same sex [is] easier than between members of the opposite sex.”86 Yet
homosexuality was from the start routinely cast in the analytic literature as
a diminished alternative to object-relationship, as an objectless, even autistic
or masturbatory, form of sexual expression.87 By the middle of the twenti-
eth century, the homosexual-as-linchpin-of-social-life had been definitively
occluded by the figure of the narcissistic homosexual who is altogether inca-
pable of sustaining relationships with others—who, in technical language,
is characterized by his “inability to cathect objects” and by a corresponding
“hypercathexis of the self.”88 That is, homosexuality had become pure love
of self.
There are a few homosexual men who love others in the post-Freudian lit-
erature of homosexuality. Thus, a paper by Otto Fenichel from 1933 gives us
a gentle, feminine homosexual narcissist, like Leonardo overidentified with
his mother, who surrounded himself with friends who—tellingly—resembled
himself.89 And a paper by Herman Nunberg published five years later features
a man whose taste in lovers ran to the “tall, strong and handsome.”90 But the
developing consensus was that the homosexual related only to partial, not
true, objects; that his characteristically “passionate and evanescent” relations
with others did not qualify as object relations proper; and that in any case he
didn’t in fact evince object strivings.91 Rather, because many homosexuals
could not apprehend sexual partners as total personalities, such partners were
not really persons to them but rather vehicles “for instantaneous instinctual
discharge.” Their sexuality characterized by its “strikingly compulsive” quality,
they pursued fleeting gratifications, not lasting connections. The “incredible
ease” with which they substituted “one partner for another” was replicated in
the analytic situation, in which they connected deeply to analysts—effected
object cathexes to them—then abandoned them.92 Narcissistic to the core,
such men could not be induced to become fully loving persons.
It is worth calling attention here to the fantasy of perfectly realized het-
erosexual object-relating that serves as the foil to this damning portrait of
homosexual deficiency. This fantasized heterosexuality is all the more strik-
ing in light of Freud’s consistently having underscored the fraught nature of
heterosexual attraction in men, the difficulty of its achievement given male
proclivity for splitting women into virgins and whores, and the many ways
in which civilization was premised on the impossibility of achieving sexual
satisfaction. And, more technically, it is striking in light of his contention in
his 1914 essay, “On Narcissism,” that the “complete object-love” characteristic
of men was itself premised on a “marked sexual overvaluation” of the loved
one derived from the subject’s childhood narcissism, now transferred onto
the object of his love; the loved one, that is, is loved in part narcissistically
in the register of self-love.93 As a later commentator on this puzzling phe-
nomenon of universal self-love summarized it, what appears manifestly as
vaunted object love, love of “an actual person,” may at bottom be deceptively
narcissistic.94 Other analysts likewise argued that homosexuals were drawn to
sameness, to qualities in the other that were found in the self, while acknowl-
edging that heterosexual love was at base similarly narcissistic. As Sadger put
it to his colleagues in 1909, “In the types of people that the person loves one
can recognize, in addition to the characteristics of the individuals who are
loved homosexually or heterosexually, traits also of the person himself.”95
Such testimony to the fundamentally ambiguous nature of all love notwith-
standing, in the analytic literature on male homosexuality, the impediments
to love—to healthy and fully realized object relating—that in other contexts
were cast as universal were seen as peculiar to homosexuals. For all of ana-
lysts’ emphasis on the narcissistic bases of all love, they were adamant in argu-
ing that identification—which has a spectral quality about it in the literature,
opposed to an embrace of “real objects”—was far more important a factor in
homosexual than in heterosexual attraction.96 As explained by one analyst,
the homosexual’s objects were “a mixture of his own person and another who
closely resembles himself but still is not himself,” with the developmental ideal
seeing the boy moving from “pure self-love to love of himself in an object” to
finally, heterosexuality achieved, love of “an object different from himself.”97
Freud’s conceptualization of homosexuality, in his essay on Leonardo, as
a universally experienced developmental stage, a way-station on the road to
heterosexuality, went virtually uncontested within the psychoanalytic move-
ment for half a century, with opinion hardening around the notion of that it
represented, variously, an in-between state, an inhibition, a deviation from
proper development, a fixation that was to be renounced so that heterosexu-
ality could be achieved—in other words, failed heterosexuality.98 In Leonardo,
Freud conceptualized narcissism developmentally in similar terms, a move
that went far toward establishing the commonsensical quality of the propo-
sition that the homosexual was a narcissist par excellence. Homosexuality
and narcissism, both forms of self-love, were unquestioned as impediments
to mature object love. It would take the normalization of self-love under the
rubric of healthy narcissism and its ally self-esteem—the transformation of
love of self from impediment to love of the other to the very condition of the
same—to unsettle this truism.
Notes
1. Havelock Ellis, in “The Conception of Narcissism,” Psychoanalytic Review 14 (1927),
129–153, 135ff, rehearses the history of the term and his role therein.
2. Sigmund Freud, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Vol. II: 1908–1910,
ed. Herman Nunberg and Enest Federn, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International
Universities Press, 1967), 312 (November 10, 1909).
3. Rank, cited in Sydney E. Pulver, “Narcissism: The Term and the Concept,” Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 18 (1970), 319–341, at 323.
4. Steven Bruhm in Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 12, notes that the earliest (Greek, predating Ovid) fragments of
the Narcissus myth were homoerotic.
5. Paul Federn, in Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 311 (November 10, 1909).
6. In the second edition (1910; preface dated December 1909) of his Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905), to which Freud added a footnote discussing the homosexual’s
search for a young man in his own likeness to love in the way his mother had once
loved him, is to be found his first published reference to narcissism: SE 7, 144–145, n. 1
(a note that by the fourth and final edition ranges over the better part of three pages).
7. Many issues are to be found in the substantial literature on psychoanalysis (and psy-
chiatry) and homosexuality that are not broached here, where my focus is primarily
on analytic construals of homosexuals’ capacity for object relations—the issue on
which the knitting together of homosexuality and narcissism is premised. For broader
treatments, see Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Richard C. Friedman and Jennifer I. Downey, eds.,
Sexual Orientation and Psychoanalysis: Sexual Orientation and Psychoanalysis (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002); and Ronald V. Bayer’s classic work on psychiatry,
Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books,
1981).
8. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), SE 11, 100.
9. Freud to Fliess, October 9, 1898, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985). All Freud correspondence hereafter cited by date.
10. Freud, “Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading” (1907), SE 9, 245–247. The book
is Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, Leonardo da Vinci (St. Petersburg: N. N. Klobukov,
1902).
11. Freud to Jung, December 2, 1909, in The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between
Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R.F.C.
Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
12. Freud to Jung, October 17, 1909.
13. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2: Years of Maturity, 1901–1919
(New York: Basic Books, 1955), 78 (note that the pagination in the British and American
editions differs).
14. Freud to Jung, December 2, 1909; see also Freud to Ferenczi, December 3, 1909, in The
Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol. 1, 1908–1914, ed. Eva Brabant,
Ernest Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, under the supervision of André Haynal,
trans. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See Nunberg and
Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 338–352 (December 1, 1909), for a transcript of the presentation
to the Wednesday Society, which closes with Freud’s thanking his colleagues for their
“attention and active participation” before expressing his disappointment over the fact
that “the discussion has not placed more material at his disposal.”
15. Freud to Ferenczi, January 1, 1910.
16. Freud to Ferenczi, January 10, 1910.
17. Freud to Abraham, January 20, 1910, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud
and Karl Abraham, 1907–1925, ed. Ernst Falzeder, trans. Caroline Schwarzacher (London:
Karnac, 2002).
18. Freud to Ferenczi, February 8, 1910.
19. Freud to Ferenczi, March 3, 1910.
20. Freud to Ferenczi, March 10, 1910.
21. Freud to Jung, March 6, 1910.
22. Ferenczi to Freud, June 12, 1910. Ferenczi was hardly alone; Jung wrote Freud, discuss-
ing some of the opposition to the work, that he was “right on every point . . . What the
rabble say about it is neither here nor there; the thing is beautifully done and leads to
exalted spheres of knowledge,” going on to label critics “simpletons” and “duffers”:
August 11, 1910.
23. Freud to Andreas-Salome, February 9, 1919, in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé:
Letters, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, trans. William and Elaine Robson-Scott (New York: Norton,
1985). A second edition in the works, Freud wrote to Ferenczi along similar lines that
it was “certainly the only pretty thing that I have written”: February 13, 1919, in The
Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Volume 2, 1914–1919,
ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, trans. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
24. Jones, Freud, vol. 2, 78. Later analysts also saw the work as autobiographical; see,
for one example, Joseph D. Lichtenberg, “Freud’s Leonardo: Psychobiography and
Autobiography of Genius,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 26 (1978),
863–880.
25. Jones, Freud, vol. 2, 346, 78.
26. Freud to Jung, October 17, 1909.
27. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998 [1988]), 274–275. “My
homosexuality”: Freud to Ferenczi, October 17, 1910.
28. Freud, Leonardo, 82.
29. Ibid., 133, 98.
30. Ibid., 117.
31. Gay, Freud, 273–274.
33. For example, “Editor’s Note” to Freud, ibid., 59–62.
34. Lichtenberg, “Freud’s Leonardo,” 869.
35. Freud, Leonardo, 113–114, 120–121.
36. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 345, 350 (December 1, 1909).
38. Jorge L. Ahumada, “On Narcissistic Identification and the Shadow of the Object,”
International Review of Psycho-Analysis 17 (1990), 177–187; idem, “Commentary,” Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association 48 (2000), 35–41.
40. Freud, Three Essays, 222.
41. Ibid., 222; and Leonardo, 129.
43. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], SE 5, 398, n. 1, added 1911. Freud later
reworked the favoritism into “his mother’s undisputed darling,” suggesting with refer-
ence to Goethe’s loss of his brother and, in consequence, not having to share him with
his mother that as such a man might retain through life “the triumphant feeling, the
confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it”: “A Childhood
Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit ” [1917], SE 17, 156.
44. Freud, Leonardo, 116, 131, 135, 115–117; Lauren Lawrence, “The Covert Seduction
Theory: Filling the Gap between the Seduction Theory and the Oedipus Complex,”
American Journal of Psychoanalysis 48 (1988), 247–250, argues with reference to Leonardo
that Freud entertained a theory of covert parental/maternal seduction, his disavowal of
his seduction theory notwithstanding.
45 Freud, Leonardo, 112, 115 (quoting Walter Pater).
46. Ibid., 123.
47. Ibid., 129.
48. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 306–307 (November 10, 1909).
49. Ibid., 240 (May 19, 1909).
50. Gay, Freud, 9; quotes from Freud, “Letter to the Burgomaster of Příbor” (1931), SE 21,
259.
51. Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933 [1932]), SE 22,
112–135. I am indebted here and in what follows to the astute reading and insights of
Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000),
13–14. See also François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, trans.
Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 101.
52. Freud, “Femininity,” 123.
53. Freud to Fliess, October 3, 1897 (brackets in original). See also Breger, Freud, 11–12;
Breger titles his first chapter, “A Traumatic Infancy.”
54. Freud, “A Childhood Recollection,”156.
55. Freud to Fliess, October 3, 1897; Breger, Freud, 14–17. Gay, Freud, 7, writes that “like some
figures who were to engross his fantasy life later—Leonardo, Moses, to say nothing of
Oedipus—the young Freud enjoyed the loving ministrations of two mothers.”
56. Freud to Fliess, October 15, 1897.
57. Freud to Max Halberstadt, July 7, 1912, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L.
Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1975), cited in David Galef
and Harold Galef, “Freud’s Wife,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis
32 (2004), 513. Two mothers verged close to two wives—as Ferenczi suggested in
writing to Freud (December 26, 1912), reporting and interpreting one of his own
dreams: “Only you have moved to the position of father, your sister-in-law to that
of mother . . . You once took a trip to Italy with you sister-in-law (voyage de lit-à-lit),”
a scandalous intimation he immediately disavowed by adding “(naturally, only an
infantile thought!).”
58. See Ralph Blumenthal, “Hotel Log Hints at Illicit Desire that Dr. Freud Didn’t Repress,”
New York Times, December 24, 2006, for a summary of the controversy and evidence.
59. See Breger, Freud, on this issue. See also Madeline Sprengnether, “Reading Freud’s
Life,” American Imago 52 (1995), 9–54; and Ester R. Shapiro, “Grief in Freud’s Life:
Reconceptualizing Bereavement in Psychoanalytic Theory,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 13
(1996), 547–566, for traumatic readings of Freud’s early life and his idealized reconstruc-
tion of his relationship to his mother.
60. Breger, Freud, 18–21.
61. Freud, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Vol. IV: 1912–1918, ed. Herman
Nunberg and Ernst Federn, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities
Press, 1975), 136 (December 11, 1912); Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930
[1929]), SE 21, 103. Patrick Mahony, “Review of Freud, Jung and Hall the King-Maker: The
Historic Expedition to America (1909), by Saul Rosenzweig (1992),” International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993), 842–846, suggestively interprets Freud’s well-known, life-
long hostility to America in terms of his need for a negative, frustrating maternal
object.
62. Roustang, Dire Mastery, 102.
63. Freud, Leonardo, 117; Lawrence, “Covert Seduction Theory.”
65. Lewes, Male Homosexuality, 31–33.
66. Alfred Adler, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Volume I: 1906–1908, ed.
Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International
Universities Press, 1962), 394 (May 6, 1908).
67. Freud, Three Essays, 144, note 1, added 1915.
68. Fritz Wittels, in Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 58 (November 18, 1908).
69. Alcoholics: Minutes, I, 289 (January 29, 1908); suicides, Minutes, II, 503 (April 27, 1910);
philology, Minutes, I, 356 (April 1, 1908); ancient art, Minutes, II, 298 (November 3,
1909).
70. Wittels, in Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 58 (November 18, 1908), arguing in
part against state proscription of homosexuality. Freud quotation: letter, 1935, to an
American mother of a homosexual, cited in Lewes, Male Homosexuality, 32.
71. Paul Robinson, “Freud and Homosexuality,” in Whose Freud: The Place of Psychoanalysis
in Contemporary Culture, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), 144–146.
72. Lewes, Male Homosexuality, 21–23.
73. Freud, Leonardo, 100; Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, I, 118 (February 13, 1907),
Freud commenting, explaining that “Havelock Ellis uses this term when only one per-
son is involved . . . , whereas Freud uses it when there is no object; for example, those
who masturbate with images [Bilderonanisten] would not be considered autoerotic.”
74. A. A. Brill, “The Conception of Homosexuality,” Journal of the American Medical Association
61 (1913), 335–340, at 338, cited in Gustav Bychowski, “The Ego of Homosexuals,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 26 (1945), 114–127, at 114.
75. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, I, 405 (May 27, 1908), Freud commenting. Freud
invoked this scenario of rivalry transformed into love in “Some Neurotic Mechanisms
in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality” (1922), SE 18, 232.
76. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, II, 258 (May 26, 1909), Freud commenting.
77. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes, I, 303–314 (November 10, 1909).
78. Jung to Freud, February 20, 1910.
79. Ferenczi, “The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homo-Erotism)” (1913), in Sex in
Psycho-Analysis (Contributions to Psycho-Analysis), trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Dover
Publications 1956), 250.
80. Freud to Abraham, January 17, 1909, writing of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
81. Ferenczi to Freud, January 17, 1916.
82. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), SE 18, 141.
83. Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms,” 232; idem, Group Psychology, 141. Freud to Ernest
Jones, March 8, 1920, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones,
1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskaukas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993):
“The social instincts are indeed made up of both, libidinous and selfish, components,
we always considered them as sublimations of the homosexual feelings.”
84. Ferenczi, “Male Homosexuality,” 266–268.
85. Ferenczi to Freud, January 17, 1916.
86. J. C. Flügel, “Sexual and Social Sentiments,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 7 (1927):
139–176, at 140: Robert M. Riggall, “Sexuality,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 8
(1927), 530–531, abstract of ibid.
87. As an alternative, R. W. Pickford, “Déjà Vu in Proust and Tolstoy,” International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 25 (1944), 155–165; as autistic, Carl M. Herold, “Critical Analysis of the
Elements of Psychic Functions—Part III,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1942), 187–210.
88. G. Pederson-Krag, “Abstract of Edrita Fried, Combined Group and Individual Therapy
with Passive-Narcissistic Patients, International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 5 (1955),”
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 25 (1956), 455; Bychowski, “Ego of Homosexuals,” 255–259.
89. Otto Fenichel, “Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933),
260–308, at 277.
90. H. Nunberg, “Homosexuality, Magic and Aggression,” International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 19 (1938), 1–16, at 3.
91. Bychowski, “Ego of Homosexuals,” 257; Rudolph Wittenberg, “Lesbianism as a
Transitory Solution of the Ego,” Psychoanalytic Review 43 (1956), 348–357, at 348.
92. Bychowski, “Ego of Homosexuals,” 258; Fritz Morgenthaler, “Introduction to Panel
on Disturbances of Male and Female Identity as Met with in Psychoanalytic Practice,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969), 109–112, at 110.
93. Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), SE 14, 67–102, at 88.
94. Henry Harper Hart, “Narcissistic Equilibrium,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 28
(1942), 106–114, at 110.
95. Nunberg and Federn, ed., Minutes II, 307 (November 10, 1909).
96. Fenichel, “Outline,” 283–284. Ahumada, “Narcissistic Identification,” 184, writes
perceptively of Freud’s ambiguity on the question of identification, linking it to “his
uncertainties of the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ object.”
97. Carl M. Herold, “Critical Analysis of the Elements of Psychic Functions—Part III,”
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1944), 187–210, at 200.
98. Lewes, Male Homosexuality, 77. The notion of homosexuality as failed heterosexual-
ity is discussed in passing in Sidney H. Phillips, “Homosexuality: Coming out of the
Confusion,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84 (2003), 1431–1450, at 1433.
Part II
Psychoanalytic Pasts
4
The English Freud: W. H. R. Rivers,
Dreaming, and the Making of
the Early Twentieth-Century
Human Sciences
John Forrester
In the “General Preface” to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey wrote: “The imaginary model which
I have always kept before me is of the writings of some English man of sci-
ence of wide education born in the middle of the nineteenth century. And I
should like, in an explanatory and no patriotic spirit, to emphasize the word
‘English.’”1 It is an amusing, seemingly pointless, question to ask: whom did
Strachey have in mind as his model? And it leads to another parallel ques-
tion: since Strachey actually did create, through his translation, an imagined
“English Freud,” a man of science of wide education born around 1850, can
we pinpoint an actual English man of science who corresponds closely to
this figure? This “English man of science” would have to have an inclination
for bold speculation and adventure. He would have to be bold, courageous,
imaginative, and empirically immersed through firsthand experience in the
construction of a new human science or sciences. Once one specifies these
characteristics, a plausible candidate comes into focus: W. H. R. Rivers.
Rivers was the most eminent English psychologist and anthropologist of
the first two decades of the twentieth century. Only eight years younger than
Freud, Rivers qualified medically in 1886, the year Freud set up his medical
practice. After a time as a ship’s surgeon, he turned toward neurology, work-
ing on a number of occasions during the 1890s with leading scientists in
Germany—Ewald Hering, Emil Kraepelin, and Wilhelm Kühne. “I have dur-
ing the last three weeks come to the conclusion that I should go in for insan-
ity when I return to England and work as much as possible at psychology,”
he confided to his diary in 1892. Giving lectures on mental diseases at Guy’s
71
72 John Forrester
on his return, he was also invited in 1893 to teach experimental psychol-

ogy and physiology at both University College, London and Cambridge: in
1897 he established “the first” laboratory in Britain in experimental psychol-
ogy in both universities. From 1897 on, his principal residence was St John’s
College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1902. He also participated
in the Cambridge Torres Straits Expedition of 1898, which led to the addi-
tion of anthropology to his already substantial range of scientific interests.
In the period 1899–1914, Rivers worked both at physiological psychology and
at anthropology. The latter field preoccupied him increasingly from 1906
onward, with expeditions to India and to Melanesia. Arriving back in England
in 1915, he took on war work: first at the Great Eastern Hospital in Cambridge,
then at Maghull Hospital near Liverpool, which was becoming the national
center for the development of psychotherapeutic treatment of the war neuro-
ses. In late 1916, now commissioned in the RAMC, he moved to Craiglockhart
Hospital for Officers, where he remained till late 1917. For the rest of the war,
he was psychologist at the Royal Flying Corps Central Hospital at Hampstead
in London. He had resigned his university position at Cambridge in 1916,
possibly because he was envisaging a move to Manchester as professor of com-
parative religion2; however, after the war he did return to Cambridge without
a university position and was appointed praelector in natural sciences by St
John’s College.3 After the war, Rivers became a public figure, both within the
academic disciplines—psychology, anthropology, folklore—and as a public
intellectual, agreeing to stand as the Labour candidate for the University of
London in the 1922 general election. His sudden death of a strangulated her-
nia on June 4, 1922, at the age of 58, cut short an expansive new phase of his
life and was a profound blow to the public life of England and to the academic
communities of which he was the acknowledged leader.4
Rivers’s response to Freud has rightly been viewed as something of a litmus
test for the receptivity of English science to psychoanalysis. Many histori-
ans have distinguished Rivers’s views and methods from those of the psy-
choanalysts, principally Freud.5 In this they have taken Rivers at his word,
noting how he criticized the doctrines of the unconscious, of repression, of
the importance of infantile sexuality—all the shibboleths of psychoanalysis.
Yet what is most striking in Rivers’s work is, again taking him at his word,
how impressed he is by the “genius” of Freud, by the revolution in medical
psychology wrought by Freud, and how under the spell of Freud he is—not
only at the level of theoretical concepts, where he went out of his way both
to acclaim and to criticize and disagree, but at the level of method. Indeed,
the book Conflict and Dream would be best titled A Dialogue with Freud in and
on Dreams. It is a book that is “normal science” in the Kuhnian sense at its
clearest: it takes the exemplars of a great scientific achievement as its model
and worries away at the puzzles the achievement of that model opens up for
subsequent researchers.6
Siegfried Sassoon’s semi-autobiographical accounts of his life-transforming
encounter with Rivers in 1917 at Craiglockhart have given Rivers wider cultural
resonance, while Pat Barker’s celebrated The Regeneration Trilogy has elevated
The English Freud 73
him to near-mythical status. Barker uses Rivers’s own writings and histori-
cal materials relating to him to construct an imagined portrait of a humane
but internally troubled physician, trying out the new methods of treatment
made necessary by war, tracking his own way between the moral pressures of
treating soldiers only so as to send them back to the hell of the front and his
sense of patriotic duty.7 In Barker’s account Rivers is a good doctor because he
uses an exploratory psychotherapy with his shell-shocked patients. He refuses
the more direct method of suggestion and symptom-removal using physical,
particularly electrical shock, techniques, cast by many historians as discipli-
nary intimidation. Barker explores fully the irony that Rivers’s method, of
civilized conversation seamlessly interwoven with cathartic psychotherapy,
aided Sassoon to choose to give up his protest against the conduct of the war
and return to the front line in France, where he was wounded once again in
a “friendly fire” incident.
In parallel with his work with the war neuroses of ordinary soldiers at
Maghull in 1916 and officers at Craiglockhart in 1917, Rivers was seized with
scientific enthusiasm for Freud’s theory of dreams. Starting in 1917, he wrote
an influential and self-revelatory series of papers on Freud’s theories, Freud’s
method of treatment, and the concept of the unconscious, summed up in his
Instinct and the Unconscious (1920). Three themes were woven together in this
rejuvenating work: his real interest in psychotherapeutic work; his growing
interest in Freud’s psychological views in general, but particularly in dreams;
and the “personality change,” to which we will return, perhaps a result of the
first two, alongside the overall impact of the war. As Rivers stated:
Though I had taken much interest in the general views of Freud before the
war, I had not attempted to master his theory of dreams. I was more inter-
ested in the applications of his scheme to the explanation of psychoneuro-
sis and the anomalous behaviour of everyday life. When the war brought
me into touch with dreams as prominent symptoms of nervous disorder
and as the means of learning the real nature of the mental states underly-
ing the psychoneuroses of war, it became necessary to study Freud’s scheme
of dream-interpretation more closely, and I read his book carefully.8
Before the war, Rivers had been interested in Freud’s theories of the neu-
roses and this, along with the work of many others, including Hippolite
Bernheim, Pierre Janet, and Jules Déjerine, fed into the lectures he gave at
Cambridge on, for instance, “Physiological and Pathological Psychology”
from 1909 on, giving rise to Tripos examination questions such as: “Discuss
the psycho-pathology of hysteria” (1911). With the establishment by Rivers
and C. S. Myers9 of a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in Cambridge in
1912, the new Psychological Laboratory (built with anonymous donations
from Myers’s family) became for the first time a national center for medical
psychology; Rivers, despite his principal commitment at this time to ethnog-
raphy, was fully part of that work. So Rivers was entirely aware of the growing
interest in Freud’s work from 1908 on.10 His own was initiated by a “second
74 John Forrester
phase” of reading and war neuroses experience, starting in 1916: the inter-
est intensified markedly as he worked on his own dreams.11 The period of
most intense dream analysis began in early December 1916: “I made no great
progress in dream-analysis or in the clinical utilisation of dreams until I had
a dream myself which went far to convince me of the truth of the main lines
of the Freudian position.”12
As a result of this absorbing interest in Freud’s work on the neuroses, greatly
intensified by the work on his own dreams, Rivers became an authoritative
spokesman for the importance of Freud’s work, in particular with his paper
“Freud’s Psychology of the Unconscious,” given to the Edinburgh Pathological
Club on March 7, 1917, and published in The Lancet on June 16, 1917. Among
his strong claims for the significance of Freud’s work, Rivers emphasized that
it ranged far beyond the practical task of medical therapeutics:
Freud’s theory of the unconscious is of far wider application than the

perusal of recent medical literature would suggest. It is true that Freud is
a physician and that he was led to his theory of the unconscious by the
study of disease, but his theory is one which [p. 160] concerns a universal
problem of psychology. If it is true, it must be taken into account, not only
by the physician, but by the teacher, the politician, the moralist, the soci-
ologist, and every other worker who is concerned with the study of human
conduct . . . It is possible, even probable, that the practical application of
Freud’s theory of the unconscious in the domain of medicine may come to
be held as one of its least important aspects, and that it is in other branches
of human activity that its importance will in future be greatest. I may per-
haps mention here that my own belief in the value of Freud’s theory of the
unconscious as a guide to the better understanding of human conduct is
not so much based on my clinical experience as on general observation of
human behaviour, on evidence provided by the experience of my friends,
and most of all on the observation of my own mental activity, waking and
sleeping.13
Rivers here places himself on the front line: his conviction of the signifi-
cance of Freud’s theory does not stem from his authority as psychologist,
anthropologist, or practicing military physician, but from his personal life
and the private experience of his friends. This celebrated paper was avow-
edly an attempt to tread a fine line between the warring Freud enthusiasts
and detractors14; yet in brokering agreement in a disinterested manner, Rivers
combined the tone of the impartial observer and judge with the enthusiasm
and conviction of a patient who has succumbed to a series of personal epiph-
anies. Without entering too far into the vexed and still controversial question
of the overall place of psychological theories and psychological therapies in
the treatment of the tens of thousands of cases of “war neuroses,”15 there is
clear evidence that a large number of physicians became convinced of the
efficacy and necessity of psychological therapies, including the cathartic cure
derived from Breuer and Freud and a more “psycho-analytic” therapy of free
association, analysis of resistances, and dream analysis. Among these doctors,

Rivers was regarded as a leader whose outstanding scientific reputation pro-
vided a useful cover of serious respectability for the scandalous sexual theo-
ries that emanated from a capital of the Central Powers. (As Rivers closed his
Lancet paper: “Are we to reject a helping hand with contumely because it some-
times leads us to discover unpleasant aspects of human nature and because it
comes from Vienna?”) Myers put it as follows: “He had the courage to defend
much of Freud’s new teaching at a time when it was carelessly condemned in
toto by those in authority, who were too ignorant or too incompetent to form
any just opinion of its undoubted merits and undoubted defects.”16
The principle of conflict, the theory of forgetting, the etiological impor-
tance of infantile experience, the distinction between the manifest and latent
content of dreams, the mechanisms of displacement, condensation and sym-
bolization both in dreams and in the neuroses, the psychoanalytic theory
of the unconscious—many of the key principles and claims of Freudian psy-
choanalysis feature in Rivers’s papers up to 1920. The fact that he endorsed
them made the discussion of Freud’s controversial and scandalous views, so
mercilessly attacked by some (often the senior figures among asylum alien-
ists), incomparably easier.
Rivers the Dreamer
Following the armistice in November 1918, the academic year in Cambridge

was extended so that the many students starting in January 1919 fresh from
the forces could complete a full year by the autumn. From early August, Rivers
gave 19 lectures on “Instinct and the Unconscious.”17 In 1920–21 and 1921–22
he lectured on dreams. The first series of lectures was published as Instinct
and the Unconscious (1920); after his sudden death in June 1922, the second
series was published by his literary executor Elliot Smith as Conflict and Dream
(1923). In both books Rivers revealed himself in new and unprecedented ways:
in the first, in returning to his original enthusiasm for a scientific psychology
of the insane, he blended accounts of his treatment of the war neuroses and
his championing of Freudian ideas with a neurophysiological theory of the
biological basis of a fully Freudian unconscious, not that of the introspection-
ists, “clinging to a simulacrum of the conscious.”18
One who wishes to satisfy himself whether or no unconscious experience

exists should subject his own life-history to the severest scrutiny, either
aided by another in a course of psycho-analysis or, though less satisfactory
and less likely to convince, by a process of self-analysis. It will perhaps
be instructive if I give a result of my own self-analysis, which though at
present incomplete, has done much to convince me of the reality of the
unconscious.19
The curious example he gives, which he himself finds so convincing of the

existence of the dynamic unconscious, is “the completeness of the blank
76 John Forrester
in my mind in connection with that upper storey”20 of the house in which

he grew up to the age of five, thereby emphasizing that a self-analysis must
confront infantile experience and infantile amnesia, just as Freud asserted.
Conflict and Dream was even more revealing of Rivers’s internal world, since
he followed Freud’s example in both spirit and letter in using principally his
own dreams to examine critically Freud’s theory of dreams. It was, as Rivers
fully recognized, inevitable that, in doing so, one expose one’s inner life to
the scientific public.
As had Tansley,21 Rivers’s commitment to dream analysis was initiated by a
nocturnal epiphany:
In October 1916 I was transferred to a hospital for officers, where I soon

began to obtain from my patients dreams of a less simple kind [than mani-
fest wish-fulfilments], but I made no great progress in dream-analysis or in
the clinical utilisation of dreams until I had a dream myself which went far
to convince me of the truth of the main lines of the Freudian position.22
It was this “Presidency” dream that opened the book, just as Freud’s dream
of “Irma’s injection” opened the substantive part of Freud’s dream-book. The
dream of “Irma’s injection” established two principles: first that dreams could
be interpreted if one followed the method of associating to each discrete ele-
ment of the dream as remembered on waking; second that the overall dream,
once it had been interpreted, was in the nature of a wish-fulfillment. Rivers
confirmed both these principles in his “Presidency” dream.
Set in a Cambridge College garden, the dream moved into a vague evoca-
tion of a meeting of the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in
which the only person the dreamer recognized was reading a list of names.
When the reader was finished, he put the paper from which he was read-
ing on the table, and I leaned over to look at it, in order to ascertain who
had been nominated as President, for I knew that his name would appear
at the head of the list of new members of Council. There I read
S. Poole.
In Rivers’s dream analysis, he was quickly led to a conflict between his desire
to spend more time in Cambridge doing his own work and his desire to be
elected president of the Institute. Via a series of names—Stanley Pool; Professor
Lane-Poole; a young doctor named “Temp. Lieut. Samuel Pool, M.B., R.A.M.C.”
whose name Rivers had glanced at in The Scotsman; a bookseller’s catalogue in
which the form “S. Lane-Poole” had occurred—Rivers inferred that the name
was a disguised version of his own—the “S” from “RiverS,” the “Pool” from
schoolboy pranks with “river”—“streams, waters,” and so on: “A wish that I
should be chosen to be president of a society was disguised by the appearance
of my name in a distorted form.”23
Rivers’s analysis was visibly preoccupied with repeating the two founding
principles of Freudian interpretation: first, the rigorous determinism of the
elements that appeared in the dream, in particular the recent occasions on

which he had glanced at newspapers or lists in catalogues and seen names in
passing, which were then opportunistically utilized by the process of dream
distortion to represent his own name in a disguised form. Implicit in this
empirical demonstration of the exact determination of the name was the over-
all principle: dreams are capable of being interpreted—of being understood,
of being shown to be the result of mental relations of cause and effect. This
demonstration of mental determinism, of causal laws in the mental sphere,
clearly appealed to the kind of scientist Rivers had always been: in search of
causal laws through experiment. On May 6, 1917, a few months after Rivers,
Bertrand Russell was undergoing the same revelatory experience:
I am reading Freud on dreams, most exciting—I see in my mind’s eye a

great work on how people come to have the opinions they have—interest-
ing scientifically, & undermining ferocity at the base (unmasking, I ought to
have said)—because it is always hidden behind a veil of morality.24
Russell would express this appeal of Freudianism in his authoritative style in

The Analysis of Mind: “[D]reams, as Freud has shown, are just as much sub-
ject to laws as are the motions of the planets.”25 These two key figures in
Cambridge science, Rivers and Russell, felt the same immediate enthusiasm
for Freud’s dream theory, in significant part because of the immense exten-
sion into the mind of the rule of scientific law he offered.
Second, Rivers introduced the “Presidency” dream as the first that con-
vinced him of the “main lines” of the Freudian position: that not only were
undistorted dreams wish fulfillments, but so were more complex, more dis-
torted dreams, once suitably interpreted. However, having demonstrated the
key principles of Freudian dream analysis and having shown how convinced
a “Freudian” he therefore was, Rivers immediately turned to develop criti-
cisms of the Freudian theory of wish-fulfillment. The book’s plot was a narra-
tive unfolding, through a series of key dreams, most of them his own, of his
critical modification of Freud’s theory.
In the history of my attitude towards Freud’s theory of the dream . . . a scep-

tical tendency was overcome by the experience of a dream arising out of
a latent desire to be President of a Society. One result of this dream was
to make me a temporary convert to the view that the dream expresses the
fulfilment of a wish.26
Rivers then recapitulated the development of his views beyond those of

Freud’s wish theory, first in the hypothesis that the motive force of the dream
is any dominant affect, such as fear, anger, reproach, or desire, present in
the dreamer prior to sleep, and second to his more stable final position, that
dreams are the expressions of recent conflicts in the dreamer’s mental life.
While Rivers was explicitly and persistently critical of Freud’s theories in
the lectures on dreams that became Conflict and Dream, the whole form of his
78 John Forrester
book replicated the model of Die Traumdeutung. With each chapter, with each
new concept, Freud had used one of his own dreams to illustrate and dem-
onstrate a new concept. Rivers did the same and added an additional dimen-
sion: he made it quite clear that his views of Freud’s theories had changed
significantly over the course of the months when he was putting Freud to the
test with his dream life, from December 1916 to the autumn of 1917, so that
each of his principal dreams was analyzed both to show the importance of
Freud’s specific theory and also the historical unfolding, in the narrative of
his dream life, of his differences from Freud on each specific question. And
not only did Rivers, following Freud, intertwine the public analysis of his
own dreams with the exposition of his theory, he repeated Freud’s warning
to the reader to expect some, but not too much, self-revelation:
One of the greatest hindrances to the psychological study of dreams, or

rather to the general discussion of its problems, is the fact that the dream is
continually revealing thoughts and sentiments of the dreamer which can-
not easily be made public . . . One of the infantile characters of the dream-
consciousness is that it blurts out like a child just what it really thinks and
feels about persons and things. Thus, in the dream of my own already
recorded I was obliged to omit certain features for this reason . . . Freud
himself has suffered greatly from this limitation.27
As with Freud, whose dreams and their analyses constitute the most extensive
evidence we have as to his inner life, so with Rivers: nowhere else but in his
dreams does he reveal his feelings about the family tradition of anthropol-
ogy; nowhere else does he reveal his sense that it may be immoral to receive
his fellowship emoluments while being paid as a major in the RAMC during
the war; nowhere else does he reveal the difficulties of treating soldiers who
had been through extreme experiences in the trenches. Amid the swirl of
themes that flood out of his dream life, there is one, the politics of the war,
that clearly constitutes a central portion of Rivers’s own self-analysis. And in
Rivers’s dream life, the politics of the war is summed up in one image: the
Cambridge Magazine.
The Heretics Society was founded in Cambridge by undergraduate C. K.
Ogden in 1909 and soon developed into the most adventurous forum for
intellectual debate in Cambridge until its demise in 1930.28 The Cambridge
Magazine was started in 1912 by Ogden as an extension of the Heretics. In
addition to reviews of drama, sport, and other topics of university inter-
est, it printed talks given to the Heretics (which had included before the war
addresses by Jane Harrison, Bertrand Russell, G. H. Hardy, G. B. Shaw, and
Rivers’s “The Primitive Conception of Death” in May 1911) and poetry—for
instance, the first publication in November 1912 of Rupert Brooke’s bitter-
sweet satire “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Once war was declared, the
magazine gave conspicuous coverage to sceptical views about the value of
the war, to the formation of the Union of Democratic Control, which called
for parliamentary control of the war and negotiations between the warring
powers and, in particular, printed Romain Rolland’s later famous denuncia-

tions of the war. From October 1915 on, it published a weekly section of
“Foreign Opinion: A Weekly Survey of the Foreign Press,” edited by Dorothy
Buxton from newspapers across Europe, including the Central Powers, and
outside Europe; it was the only source of such foreign press reports to be
published in England throughout the war. As a result, the circulation of the
Magazine during 1915–18 was up to twenty thousand.
To understand the significance of the Cambridge Magazine for Rivers, we must
recapitulate the principal dreams that Rivers analyzed in the key period from
the end of 1916 to his departure from Craiglockhart to Hampstead in autumn
1917 and the overall development of his views concerning psychoanalysis.
As we have seen, the dream that ignited Rivers’s self-analysis and persuaded
him of the cogency of Freud’s theory he called the “Presidency” dream. In
March 1917 he was developing the view that “dreams might be the expres-
sion of any affective state of which the dreamer had been the subject during
the preceding day”29 and not only wishes. During the night of March 20–21,
1917, Rivers dreamed that “I was reading a letter from a Cambridge friend”—
“the highly reproachful character of the communication was evident.”30 The
reproaches were connected with “the general European situation at the time.”
“On the previous day,” Rivers reported, “I had also received the Cambridge
Magazine of 17th March, containing an account of the attack which was being
made on the Magazine at the time and of the measures by which the attack
was being met.”31 The first layer of background dream thoughts were preoc-
cupied with the international politics and economics of continuing the war
“jusqu’au bout.” But Rivers then turned his analysis away from politics to the
immediate anxieties of his hospital work and arrived at an interpretation in
terms of a self-reproach concerning a difficult disciplinary matter he had had
to deal with, in which he had solved the problem by “the application of a
somewhat violent procedure” for which “I had definitely reproached myself
for what I counted as a failure.”32
Rivers was satisfied with this analysis of the dream, referring the reproach
in the letter to the self-reproach concerning his violent disciplining of hospital
patients, because it “seemed to furnish striking confirmation of the view to
which I was already being led, that dreams are attempts to express in sleep
the affective state which is prominent in the dreamer’s mind before going to
sleep.”33 But by July 29, 1921, when he was writing up this chapter, he had
changed his theoretical position to the view that dreams are “a solution or
attempted solution of a conflict.”34 Looking back Rivers now revised his view:
[T]he real factor determining the dream proper was a conflict arising in
some way out of my attitude to the war . . . At the time of the dream (1917)
I was manifestly adopting the orthodox attitude, and any such pacifist
tendency as might have been aroused by reading the Cambridge Magazine
would have been repressed, thus providing exactly the conditions by
which such a dream as that with which we are dealing would have been
produced.35
80 John Forrester
That night, July 29–30, 1921, Rivers had a long and confused dream whose
only clear content was “that I was going to my bedroom to have a siesta after
lunch, taking with me books to read.”
On waking from this dream I found myself thinking about the problem
of the day before [i.e., the political interpretation of the original dream],
and then remembered clearly what I had then completely forgotten, that
I had had a definite conflict in my mind at the time (i.e. March 1917)
whether I was right in subscribing to the Cambridge Magazine. The conflict
was between the view that it must be right to know the truth, to know
what the people of other nations, enemy or allied, were thinking, and the
view that in time of war nothing should be done to make people doubt-
ful about the absolute justice of the cause for which they were fighting.
In such a conflict there would be little question that the former attitude
would appeal more to my adult intelligence, while the second point of
view would have appealed to me in youth.36
So Rivers now revised his interpretation: instead of it being a continuation

into sleep of the self-reproaches over a medical decision, it became an expres-
sion of a personal conflict, symbolized by the Cambridge Magazine, between
“knowing the truth” at all costs, even that of patriotic duty, and “winning the
war” at all costs, even that of truth.
The symbolism of the Cambridge Magazine went even further:
I had the impression that the books which I was taking to my bedroom
were connected in some way with the Cambridge Magazine, though this
impression was vague. (Footnote: In connection with this, it may be men-
tioned that the Cambridge Magazine undertook the sale of books.) . . . In
association with the act of taking these books to my bedroom I had the
idea that it might have been right to read the Magazine in private, but that
it was not suited for general circulation . . . The bedroom of the dream thus
seems to have served as a symbol for privacy as opposed to publicity in
relation to this publication.37
What had prompted the lifting of repression concerning the conflict over
the Cambridge Magazine? This lifting took place in July 1921 as a result of the
second dream. But there was another dream analyzed later in the book, the
“Pacifist dream,” which raised similar issues. Rivers gave no date for this dream,
but internal evidence places it at the end of July 1917. The dream took Rivers
back to the late 1890s when he was conducting physiological-psychological
research with Kraepelin and Kühne at Heidelberg, a time when he had worked
side by side in friendship with German scientists. The dream’s narrative “not
only implied peace, but also the restoration of the friendly relations between
the scientific men of the two countries which existed before the war and was
still more definite in the student days twenty years ago.” In addition, the yel-
low cover of the journal Anthropos, figuring prominently in the dream, was
edited and published in Austria in French, Italian, English, as well as German,

and “thus forms a fitting symbol of international peaceful relations.”38
However, the immediate instigator of the dream was “Patient B.,” with
whom Rivers had lunched and spent the evening in conversation, and who
“was not suffering from any form of psycho-neurosis, but was in the hos-
pital on account of his adoption of a pacifist attitude while on leave from
active service.”39 The patient was Siegfried Sassoon, who had arrived courtesy
of Robert Graves at Craiglockhart by July 24, when they together celebrated
Graves’s 22nd birthday.40 It is Sassoon’s pacifism that gives the dream its title.
Three evenings a week I went along to Rivers’ room to give my anti-war

complex an airing. We talked a lot about European politicians and what
they were saying. Most of our information was derived from a weekly
periodical which contained translations from the foreign Press . . . All that
matters is my remembrance of the great and good man who gave me his
friendship and guidance. I can visualize him, sitting at his table in the late
summer twilight, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and his
hands clasped in front of one knee; always communicating his integrity
of mind; never revealing that he was weary as he must often have been
after long days of exceptionally tiring work on those war neuroses which
demanded such an exercise of sympathy and detachment combined.41
Sassoon’s recollection of the “weekly periodical which contained trans-

lations from the foreign Press,” the Cambridge Magazine, combined with
Rivers’s dreams of the Magazine highlights its importance as the principal
object of contention and reference point for the two men. The significance
of the Cambridge Magazine would have been increased by a factor that nei-
ther Sassoon nor Rivers mention: the first of Sassoon’s war poems were
being regularly published in the Magazine.42 On June 9, “In an underground
dressing-station” and “Supreme sacrifice” were published in the Magazine; “To
any dead officer” was published by Ogden as a separate Cambridge Magazine
pamphlet in August 1917, just when Rivers and Sassoon were engaged most
concentratedly in their exchanges. These were very powerful antiwar poems,
full of bitter satire for civilian noncombatants and the old men sending the
young to their deaths, full of bleak compassion for the men who had died
in the mud of Flanders, poetic grenades inducing “the shock / Of ugly war
brought home.”43 In the analysis of the “Pacifist Dream,” Rivers recalls how,
as soon as he had arrived, Patient B. was directing his reading “partly in
order to help me to understand his position”44: he finished reading Barbusse’s
Under Fire (the translation published in June 1917) and the evening before the
dream had been reading an article in the English Review, which had persuaded
Rivers more strongly than any previous piece on the virtues of peace through
negotiation.
“Friendly relations between . . . men”45: this is the scene reproduced in the
dream, most obviously in the “student days twenty years ago” in Heidelberg,
but also in the new and dramatically challenging relations with Sassoon, which
82 John Forrester
was the immediate stimulus for the dream, in which Sassoon and Rivers talked
politics, reading through the Cambridge Magazine and other “left-leaning” read-
ing material that Sassoon thrust at Rivers, Rivers opening up to Sassoon on
the life of fraternal collaboration with German scientists in the 1890s when
he had lived with a professor and worked with him in the same building, a
“combination of dwelling-house and laboratory, which is unusual in England,
[but] frequently occurs in Germany.”46 What might result from such warm and
unguarded conversations?: “[W]hen I was reading the Review I had thought of
the situation that would arise if my task of converting a patient from his ‘pacifist
errors’ to the conventional attitude should have as its result my own conversion
to his point of view.”47 “[O]ne of our jokes had been about the humorous situ-
ation which would arise if I were to convert him to my point of view,” Sassoon
wrote.48 Many later writers, the most prominent of them being Pat Barker in
Regeneration, have been drawn to the inherent drama of this meeting between
the humanely sympathetic, previously duty-bound Rivers and the hero and
poet Sassoon struggling between his own sense of solidarity with the soldiers,
both dead and alive, in France, and his revulsion at the dirty trick played on his
generation by the generals, by the patriotic women, by the English.
Rivers initially portrayed his own pacifist leanings as “egoistic” in character:
peace would allow him to “get back to my proper studies, which had been
interrupted by the war.”49 But as his analysis unfolded, he set up a stark contrast
between his long-held “fight to the finish” views and the revival, as represented
in the dream, of the conviction he had held as a young man of “the value of sci-
entific co-operation as a step towards international friendship.”50 Even though
a crucial moment in the dream had been him turning “the wrong way,” requir-
ing his German host to call out to him that he must go to the left, not the right,
the conflict remained unresolved. Him turning to the left he later defended as
to be correctly understood as a political, not an ethical, symbolization:
It seems far more likely that in this case “right” and “left” had reference
to the customary means of denoting Conservative and Liberal tendencies,
especially on the Continent. I was especially familiar at the time with the
use of these expressions in the extracts from foreign journals published in
the Cambridge Magazine, which I read regularly, and a movement to the left
in such journals is a regular symbolic expression for Liberal tendencies.51
Rivers did indeed move to the Left as a result of his personal transformation
during the war. He was sympathetic to Sassoon’s immediate postwar wish to
join the Labour Movement, advising him to study political economy at Oxford
in order to do so effectively.52 Postwar, the indefatigable Rivers increasingly
spoke to meetings where nonelite audiences were to be found and in his last
months, took on as an assistant an uneducated Northern worker. In 1922 he
himself agreed to stand as the Labour candidate for the University of London
in the general election.
Rivers’s final theoretical position on dreams was that they are “attempts to
solve in sleep conflicts of waking life.”53 His account of the “Pacifist Dream”
showed it to be a representation of a conflict (recently aroused by his con-

versations with Siegfried Sassoon) between newly awakened pacifism, which
could draw upon his egotistic motives, and his youthful internationalist ide-
als. Yet the dream did not solve the conflict, and nowhere in his discussion of
the dream did he reveal his own feelings or views concerning Sassoon’s paci-
fist position. Still frustrated, many years on, Sassoon himself felt this absence:
“Looking back from to-day [1936], however, I am interested, not in what my
own feelings were, but in what Rivers had been thinking about the decision
which he had left me so entirely free to make.” In his “medical” relationship
with Sassoon, and in his account of his own dreams, Rivers maintained a stu-
dious neutrality about his political position—he adopted the strictly neutral
position of the psychoanalyst.
Yet the interpretations of the two dreams, the “Reproachful Letter” and
the “Pacifist Dream,” indicate very clearly that Rivers went through a proc-
ess of political awakening in the course of the war, even if he held firm to
the practical ideal of psychotherapeutic neutrality in his army medical work.
What prompted this awakening? If Rivers had not met Sassoon, would he
have remained imperturbable in his “fight to the finish” attitude? This is
quite possibly the case. Yet the reanalysis of the “Reproachful letter” dream,
centered on the revival of the symbol “Cambridge Magazine,” indicates that, in
July 1921, Rivers rediscovered this political conflict as active in his own inner
life four months before Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart. By rewriting his own
autobiographical journey (in the revision of his analysis of the “Reproachful
letter” dream), he effectively took this pivotal role away from Sassoon. He
would not allow that much power to one man.
Curiously enough, then, there is a parallel in Rivers’s relationship with Freud
and his relationship with Sassoon. Both relationships represented threats to
the independence of his own judgment. The dream book is overtly an account
of Rivers’s shifting relations with Freud’s dream theories. At first, he was
enthusiastically under the spell of Freud’s theories; then he drew back, critical
scientist to the fore, proposing that any affective state could be the driving
force behind the dream, then that dreams were attempts at resolution of the
unresolved conflicts of waking life. He even fell into the trap into which many
of Freud’s readers are tempted: he thought he could revise Freud’s theories by
reinterpreting Freud’s own dreams. The overall result was that Rivers’s views
on dreams were very close to Freud’s, though this was often difficult to see
because of his frequent minor—and confusing—changes of terminology and
emphasis.54 Rivers himself insisted there was considerable distance between
his own views and those of Freud. But close readers of Rivers’s work were more
struck by their similarities than their differences and were irritated by his ter-
minological fussiness, to no good purpose.
“I propose,” [Rivers] says, “to regard Freud’s formula [of wish-fulfilment] as

unduly simple, and suggest as an alternative the working hypothesis that
the dream is the solution, or attempted solution, of a conflict which finds
expression in ways characteristic of different levels of early experience.”
84 John Forrester
This is not really so big a change as might appear, and the difficulty is in
connexion with the term “wish,” rather than with the underlying notion.
A conflict must mean the presence of opposed tendencies having differ-
ent ends. A solution or an attempted solution must mean that one of the
ends, or a combination of the ends, is sought to the exclusion of the others.
Any such seeking of an end to the exclusion of others is a “wish” in the
Freudian sense of the term.55
This acute observation, showing that Rivers had not fundamentally altered
the Freudian theory but had only engaged in superficial terminological
refashioning, did not come from an arch-Freudian. Far from it: the reviewer
was Frederick Bartlett, Rivers’s former student and, following his death,
director of the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge, writing in the jour-
nal Mind. Less surprisingly, perhaps, an even sharper observation came from
Ernest Jones:
[Rivers] has been able to confirm Freud’s theory up to a certain point,

though not beyond this where it concerns the deeper layers of the mind.
Thus, he agrees with Freud that dreams are of great psychical significance;
that the distinction between the manifest and latent content is of cardi-
nal importance; that the latent content indicates a remarkable distortion
(which he prefers to term transformation) before it is converted into the
manifest content; that there are regular laws by which this transformation
occurs; that the latent content is a repressed one—in short, all the more
essential parts of Freud’s theory. He dislikes Freud’s term “wish-fulfilment”
and prefers to regard the dream as the expression of an attempt to solve
some conflict; the difference here is in most cases verbal only.56
These two well-informed reviewers agreed: Rivers’s criticisms of Freud were

essentially terminological; what he portrayed as major criticisms were in
reality minor quibbles over nomenclature. In other words, he had persuaded
himself that there was a greater distance between his views and Freud’s than
actually existed. He had, unwittingly, become more of a “Freudian” than he
believed he was. But, out of fear for his independence of mind, he magnified
his own differences from Freud.
An Independent Mind
A similar dynamic is at work in Rivers’s relations with the pacifists of the

Cambridge Magazine and his medical charge, Siegfried Sassoon. Did Rivers
become more of a “Sassoonian” than he believed he was? The impact of Rivers
on Sassoon is well documented. In his Diaries, Sassoon recorded on July 26,
1917: “Rivers, the chap who looks after me . . . I am very glad to have the chance
of talking to such a fine man.”57 On October 19, he reported: “He says I’ve
got a very strong ‘anti-war’ complex, whatever that means,”58 and on October
29: “Rivers thinks my ‘Fight to a Finish’ poem in the Cambridge Magazine
very dangerous!”59 (“And with my trusty bombers turned and went/To clear
those Junkers out of Parliament.”) Trustworthy Rivers protected Sassoon very
effectively: “The Board asked if I had changed my views on the war, and I
said I hadn’t, which seemed to cause surprise. However Rivers obtained, pre-
viously, an assurance from a high quarter that no obstacles would be put in
the way of my going back to the sausage machine.”60 Sassoon, strongly prone
to idealization of authoritative figures in his life, recounted repeatedly in his
autobiographical writings the crucial place that Rivers quickly came to have
in his inner life. In his whimsical best-selling semi-autobiographical writings,
classics of antiwar literature, he replaced all real names of people, places, and
houses with fictional names—with one exception: Dr. Rivers always remained
Dr. Rivers.
While recuperating at his mother’s house during May and June 1917,
Sassoon came to the decision to make his Public Declaration—the declaration
that eventually led him into the care of Rivers at Craiglockhart and which
was drafted in consultation with Bertrand Russell. Simultaneously he was
already drafting one of his first powerful “war poems,” eventually published
under the title “Repression of War Experience.” Six months later, on December
4, having left Craiglockhart, Rivers gave an address to the Royal Society of
Medicine in London entitled “On the repression of war experience.”
Whose title was it? It seems unlikely that Sassoon would have chosen this
title without Rivers’s example. Most plausibly the poem’s title is a tribute to
Rivers. But it is a well-considered tribute, since the subject of Sassoon’s poem
is precisely the subject of Rivers’s paper. “Many of the most trying and dis-
tressing symptoms from which the subjects of war neurosis suffer,” Rivers
wrote, “are not the necessary result of the strains and shocks to which they
have been exposed in warfare, but are due to the attempt to banish from the
mind distressing memories of warfare or painful affective states which have
come into being as the result of their war experience.”61 Rivers’s paper is a
criticism of the policy of repression—the deliberate attempt to push horrify-
ing memories and affects out of consciousness: “[W]e must not be content
merely to advise our patients to give up repression, we must help them by
every means in our power to put this advice into practice.”62 Sassoon was the
best example possible of someone who never let his “war experience” out of
his mind, and was undoubtedly “healthy.” Walking in step with Rivers’s argu-
ment, Sassoon’s poem63 enacted the effects of the doctrine of repression:
—it’s bad to think of war,

When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
They were of one mind on this issue.

The preoccupation Rivers and Sassoon thus shared with the “repression of
war experience” helps us understand more clearly Rivers’s idiosyncratic usage
86 John Forrester
of the term “repression,” indicating a political dimension not immediately

apparent in the Freudian usage. For Rivers and Sassoon, the injunction to
“stop thinking about the war,” to “turn one’s mind to other, happier things”
went hand in hand with the political position of refusing to recognize the
reality of the war being fought in the mud of the trenches. Countering the
policy of repression amounted to a politico-therapeutic injunction to “face
the facts!”—the stark contrast to “fight to the finish!” Dividing the individual
mind (between soothing thoughts of pastoral peace and horrible recollec-
tions of war), dividing the geography of Europe (between the horrors of war
in France and the continuity of ordinary life in England), dividing the mind
of the nation (between those who knew what was going on in Europe through
the Cambridge Magazine and those who were willfully blind to everything
but the military imperative, wishing to impose this blindness on others)—
these divisions were all intertwined in Rivers’s dream life. And the image
that Rivers introduced to sum up his own version of these conflicts speaks of
yet another division: his thought that it was improper to read the Cambridge
Magazine in public since it sapped morale made the reading of the Magazine
(and thus of Sassoon’s poetry) a private act to be kept in the bedroom—like
other private acts. The privacy of the bedroom for one’s personal political life
thus hovers as a metaphor for other private acts in the bedroom.
In discussions with Sassoon, Rivers ran the risk of being converted to his
pacifist views. In discussions with Freud, Rivers ran the risk of being con-
verted to his scandalous views about sex. “Friendly relations between men”
could turn into being overwhelmed by an alien mind. Any dissemination of
views from the larger world (as in the Foreign Press section of the Cambridge
Magazine) should take place only in private, as in a bedroom.
This deep distrust of being unwittingly affected was a deep theme in Rivers’s
identity, most obviously in his scientific identity. Trained in psychology at the
historical moment when experimental introspection was the psychologist’s
principal and most vaunted special skill, Rivers’s two most famous experimen-
tal studies were organized around the elimination of extraneous, disturbing
influences on the introspected data. In his experiments on nerve regeneration
with Henry Head, his role was as “guide and counsellor.” His interest lay rather
in the psycho-physical aspect of the work and he was impressed with the inse-
curity of this side of the investigation. Introspection could be made fruitful by
the personal experiences of a trained observer only.64 “Insecurity” here meant
the difficulty of securing reliable data—that is, reliable reports. The study
of the influence of drugs employed the classic Wundtian and Kraepelinian
apparatus; what was distinctive and entirely due to Rivers was the experimen-
tal design of introducing a blind control in order to eliminate the influence
of the experimenter’s interest upon the experimental data produced.65 Once
again, the objectivity and reliability of the experimenter (Versuchsperson), not
the “object” (Reagent), was at the forefront of Rivers’s mind and led to his
methodological innovations.66 When Rivers became involved in Freudian
dream analysis, he quickly became alert to the “danger” that “according to
Freud the wish of a patient to prove or disprove the views of his physician can
provide the leading motive of a dream, and this suggests the danger that the
theories of the dreamer may influence his dreams.”67 He even had a record
of this thought, from March 19, 1917, stimulated by a rereading of the final
chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: “[T]he danger of having his dreams
influenced by his theories must be especially great in the case of one who had
formulated so definite a theoretical position as that of Freud. I had wondered
whether it might be possible to find evidence for such influence in any dream
of mine.”68 The next night he dreamed the dream of “The reproachful letter.”
Here was a dream driven entirely, it seemed, by a reproach, not a wish. But,
given his written note from the previous day, how could he be sure he was not
dreaming a reproachful dream as a refutation of Freud’s theory—just as Freud’s
chapter IV predicted he would?69 If Freud’s dreams were influenced by his
theories, might not his, Rivers’s, be? Notwithstanding this threat, he now took
his reanalysis of the dream in terms of a personal conflict over politics rather
than a self-reproach for medical failure to be evidence that the dream itself
(of reading the letter) had not been influenced by his eagerness to confirm his
own theory; only his first analysis was “contaminated” by this desire: “[T]he
theories of a dreamer may influence his self-analysis, but provides no evidence
that they influence his dreams.” What his reanalysis reveals is “one of the
dangers of such self-analysis”70 —the ever-present possibility of contamination
of one’s analysis by one’s own pet theories. But the second dream could, of
course, be a way of protecting himself from the fear that his very own dreams,
not just his analyses, were contaminated. Rivers did not raise or answer this
meta-objection.
The potential contamination inherent in psychoanalysis went even fur-
ther. The second chapter of Rivers’s book moved smoothly from his own
“Presidency” dream with its play with “rivers” to two dreams of a suicidal
patient, which also played with “rivers”; the second dream dramatized a con-
flict between “one desire to come to me for help and another desire to stand
on his own feet and rely on his own strength.”71 Rivers added immediately:
“I need hardly say that it was a regular part of my treatment to guard against
the process known to the psycho-analysts as transference.”72 The striking
phrase in this sentence is the opening: “I need hardly say.” It speaks vol-
umes: it tells us quite unambiguously, because it is so unself-conscious, that
Rivers assumed without a moment’s second thought that transference—the
development of a baseless, mistaken affective relationship between patient
and doctor—was an evil that should at all costs be avoided. “There had at
first been rather violent resistance to [the] process [of gaining access to the
patient’s early experiences], followed later by a state in which I had recog-
nised the danger of transference, and it had formed an essential part of my
treatment to inculcate independence.”73 No wonder, we might reflect, the
patient felt this violent conflict: River’s offer of help came in the form of
exhortation to independence.
Yet it is entirely in character—the character of one of the most rigorously
objective human scientists of his age—for Rivers to be wary of transfer-
ence. With his patients—all male—there was quite probably the additional
88 John Forrester
complicating factor, seen most clearly in his relations with Sassoon. The pos-
itive transference would manifest itself in a form in which the “paternal”
transference and the “homosexual” transference would be inextricably inter-
twined. For Rivers, as a man whose homosexuality was covert and ill-defined,
any response to this transference would have appeared potentially threaten-
ing and could have unpredictable effects on the patient. He had every reason
to retreat from “working with” the transference into the position he made
explicit in his writings: avoidance at all costs. And, as a result of finding no
way of working with the transference in a positive fashion, he would find
no way of working with his own countertransference: the evidence we have
takes the form of his wondering to what extent might Sassoon’s pacifist views,
whether in the form of public protest or poems, be undermining his formerly
clearly held political views.
Placing these issues of transference and countertransference in the context
of his understanding of science, we see Rivers, always aware of issues of objec-
tivity and the interests of the observer, standing on the verge of a recognition
that the observer’s implication in the scene of inquiry was constitutive of
the field of the human sciences. It was Rivers who mapped out the terrain in
ethnology of “intensive fieldwork,” of the “participant-observer,” but never
fully entered on it himself. In the field of psychotherapy, he hoped to escape
from Freud’s recognition that in both dreams and the neuroses, there was
no avoiding the implication of the subject’s own desires and the observer’s
relationship with his patients—indeed, this implication was being turned
around by Freud into the foundation stone of the theory and therapy of the
“transference neuroses.” As Buzard astutely notes,
[A]uthority derives from the demonstration not so much of some finally

achieved “insideness” in the alien state, but rather from the demonstration
of an outsider’s insideness. Anthropology’s Participant Observer, whose aim
was a “simulated membership” or “membership without commitment to
membership” in the visited culture, went on to become perhaps the most
recognizable (and institutionally embedded) avatar of this distinctively
modern variety of heroism and prestige.74
There is the sense that Rivers’s “Faustian” character, restless, unrooted, play-
ing all his parts perfectly—exacting experimentalist, roving explorer, sym-
pathetic physician, punctilious and demanding methodologist—was made
to stand on the edge, looking forward to the developing intermingling of
these future sciences. In Rivers one senses all the possibilities of the relations
of ethnology and psychoanalysis that provoked Foucault to make these two
“counter-sciences” the master disciplines for modernity:
Psychoanalysis and ethnology are not so much two human sciences

among others; rather they span the entire domain of those sciences, they
animate its whole surface, spread their concepts throughout it, and are
able to propound their methods of decipherment and their interpretations
everywhere. No human science can be sure that it is out of their debt, or

entirely independent of what they have discovered, or certain of not being
beholden to them in one way or another.75
A fused project was very much alive in the early 1920s, what John Rickman,
Quaker doctor, Rivers’s student, and Freud’s analysand, in 1923 called “the
stormy seas of anthropo-ethno-analytico-sciences.”76 But sex and transfer-
ence: these, in the end, were the topics where Rivers seemed most at odds
with Freud. There are no records available that give explicit evidence con-
cerning Rivers’s sexual life. Many writers have assumed he was homosexual
in orientation, and there is ample room for speculation that his relation-
ship with Sassoon aroused homosexual currents, at the very least in the
more general sense of relations of dependency and intimacy between men.
It is sensible to assume that the repressive atmosphere of British public life
when it came to homosexuality in the period from the Great War to the
1960s persuaded most of those who knew Rivers to remain silent about
his sexuality. In his thorough study of Rivers as an anthropologist, Ian
Langham wrote:
As one might be inclined to predict for someone born in the middle of the
Victorian era and having a clergyman for a father and two sisters who never
married, Rivers seems to have been the victim of severe sexual repression,
and this problem seems to have been compounded by what one of his
close friends interpreted as Rivers’s own tendencies towards homosexual-
ity. Note: For reasons which, if they could be revealed, would be seen as
perfectly understandable and proper, I am duty bound not to reveal the
source of the suggestion, which was advanced as a clear and confident
statement of fact, that Rivers was a closeted homosexual.77
It is even unclear if Rivers ever discovered the extent to which Sassoon’s

friendships were infused and traversed by homosexual currents and passions.
There is the striking evidence—unreliable, because remembered 60 years on,
and unreservedly and self-declaredly subjective—of Rivers’s student John
Layard, one of the earliest “participant-observers” on Atchin in Melanesia in
1914–15,78 suffering a nervous breakdown on his return, following Rivers to
Craiglockhart where in late autumn 1916 he received daily psychotherapy in
his nearby hotel. The rather disturbed Layard wrote a letter to his one close
friend, Robin Bevan-Brown, which, after the letter was posted, Layard felt,
with consternation, was a love letter.
So next time Rivers came, I told him about this. I said, “I love you, but
you’re sending me off my head. I can’t see you any more.” I remember
Rivers almost trembling and blanching when I said that. He went, and that
was the last time I ever saw him.
There’s no doubt in me now at all that “the most important thing,”
which I had never told Rivers was the transference and the love which
90 John Forrester
I must have had for him, and that he didn’t appear to know consciously
either or anyhow never spoke of.
He did the very worst thing he could about it. He wrote to Robin and
told Robin that it was better for him not to reply to me. This was Rivers’
anti-sex in every direction . . . So my last and only male link with the world
was gone, and that was obviously bound up with my dismissing Rivers.
Because Rivers had obviously not recognized the whole homosexual con-
tent of our relationship, probably both sides.79
When it came to Rivers’s understanding of the importance of sexuality for

understanding the war neuroses, we appear to be on firmer ground. There is
ample evidence that Rivers publicly disputed the importance given to sexual-
ity by Freud. Rivers’s views were certainly trumpeted by many who followed
after as evidence of the sensible and necessary corrections that the vast bulk
of informed British medical writers made to the extreme and unbalanced
views of the Freudian psychoanalysts on the question of sex. To give just one
example, an often-quoted passage from Rivers’s Instinct and the Unconscious:
It is a wonderful turn of late that just as Freud’s theory of the unconscious

and the method of psycho-analysis founded upon it should be so hotly
discussed, there should have occurred events which have produced on an
enormous scale just those conditions of paralysis and contracture, phobia
and obsession, which the theory was especially designed to explain. Fate
would seem to have presented us at the present time with an unexampled
opportunity to test the truth of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, at any
rate in so far as it is concerned with the part taken by sexual factors in the
production of mental and functional nervous disorder. In my own experi-
ence, cases arising out of the war which illustrate the Freudian theory of
sexuality directly and obviously have been few and far between. Since
the army at the present time would seem to be fairly representative of
the whole male population of the country, this failure to discover to any
great extent the cases with which the literature of the Freudian school
abounds might well be regarded as significant. If my experience is a trust-
worthy sample, it would seem as if the problem was already well on the
way towards settlement.80
River’s strategy was a familiar and repeated one: he wished to bypass the issue
of sexuality, regarding it as not essential, an “unfortunate excrescence,”81
which could be excised from the more important real discoveries that Freud
had made; he wished to rescue Freud certainly from the Freudians and, in this
respect, from himself.
However, Rivers made other comments about sexuality, which reveal a more
nuanced and less self-certain position. In his inaugural address to the newly
formed Medical Section of the British Psychological Society in May 1919, an
audience predominantly made up of the enormously expanded group of med-
ical psychologists streaming back to civilian life from their wartime military
duties,82 he argued against underestimating the importance of sexuality now

that peace was restored:
You all know how the most prominent school of students of the psycho-
neuroses believe that the instinctive tendencies which stand on one side of
the battleground belong exclusively to the instinct of sex. However repel-
lent this may be to the traditions of the medical profession, we must be
prepared to face this problem honestly and without prejudice. In turning
from the practice of war to that of peace we must expect to find a great
increase in the part taken by the sexual instinct, for the simple and obvious
reason that the conditions of our civilisation make this instinct the special
object of its repressions and taboos. We have found reason to believe that
sex plays but a little part in the causation of war neuroses, but it does not
follow that this will hold good of the neuroses of civil life. On the other
hand, we must be careful to hold the balance and not allow ourselves to
give to sexual tendencies a prominence greater than they deserve. The
sexual instinct is far from standing alone as the subject of the repressions
and taboos of social tradition. It should be our working hypothesis that
any instinct which needs repression in the interests of society may furnish
that occasion for conflict which forms the essence of neurosis.83
In preparing his book on dreams over the period 1920–21, he gave a further,
more personal twist to this counsel to be open-minded about the Freudian
emphasis on sexuality. He admitted that the dreams he had analyzed were
unrepresentative because they came from only two sources: the dreams of
traumatized soldiers and
my own dreams, where sexual conflicts might perhaps hardly be expected

to be as active as in the dreams of younger people. Moreover, most of my
own dreams which have been analysed occurred at a time when, owing
to the extreme interest of my work and my absorption in it, I was far more
free than usual from the sexual conflicts which are generally believed to
be active in dreams.84
And Rivers went on to make it quite clear that his own book was inevita-
bly reticent about sexuality: “If [my dreams] had dealt with sex-conflicts the
analyses would probably have been full of passages which a natural reticence
would have driven me to withhold or garble, thus interfering with the cogency
of the demonstration.”85 He made it pretty clear that the dreams he had used
to demonstrate his theories were, “wittingly” or “unwittingly” (key terms for
Rivers, as we have seen), the result of “comparatively innocent conflicts.”86
Make no mistake, he implied: if they had not been “innocent” he would not
have analyzed them in public.
So we see that Rivers’s considered view was the war neuroses had demon-
strated that the emphasis placed on sexuality in the etiology of all neuroses
by the Freudians was unwarranted. But Rivers did not turn his back on this
92 John Forrester
problem: he warned that the peacetime neuroses might well manifest the
force of the sexual instinct as described by Freud; he gave exceptional warn-
ing signals in his dream book that a number of factors—his age, his public
diffidence, perhaps even his inner resistances—entailed that he was not well
placed to draw certain conclusions about the importance of sexual conflicts
in dream life generally.
When it came to his own personal conflicts as revealed by his published writ-
ings, there was no question of anything sexual being explicitly—wittingly—
mentioned. Professional ambition, personal reproach, Sassoon’s protest and
pacifism—these are some of the issues Rivers’s published dream life is preoccu-
pied with; in addition, two other sets of dreams (the “London Lectures” dreams
and the dream of “Hidden Sources”) indicate a conflict between Rivers’s anthro-
pological interests and his professional psychotherapeutic duties, to which he
had found an intellectual solution: what Rivers discovered was a way to inte-
grate his anthropological and psychological interests. The program he then
outlined had important consequences for the development of anthropology
in the twentieth century: it represents the convergence of two major strands
of Rivers’s work, which he himself had thought at odds with each other. To
appreciate fully the significance of this moment—for Rivers, for anthropology,
for psychoanalysis—we must supply some background concerning Rivers’s
part in the development of anthropology.
Psychoanalysis and Ethnography
There are two mythicized founding dates for social anthropology in Britain:
the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898 and the publication in 1922 of both
Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Radcliffe-Brown’s The
Andaman Islanders.87 The second of these dates also marks the death of the
leading anthropologist of the period 1898–1922: W. H. R. Rivers, whose
career began with the Torres Straits Expedition. Another way of putting this
is to claim that what was started in 1898—the survey fieldwork approach to
understanding primitive cultures—came to fruition with the publication of
two monographs by practitioners who had learned the lessons of the Torres
Straits program and put them into practice in the 1910s, and were thus as a
consequence able to produce perfectly formed exemplars of intensive field-
work and the understanding based upon it.
This account places all the emphasis upon method: the ideal of the lone
researcher going out, immersing himself in one very specific native cul-
ture, becoming a “participant observer” (a mid-1920s term) and reporting
back. Part of the eventual prestige of social anthropology would come to rest
on the sheer arduousness of the labor involved and hardships undergone
in this process and upon the fact that no other researchers were involved
or had ever been there: the new fieldwork ideal was strangely solitary and
naïvely empiricist in its conception of professional expertise. Yet there was
an accompanying conceptual transformation in the period 1898–1922: where
the center of gravity of anthropology had been evolutionism and religion,
the new social anthropology was nonevolutionist (because synchronic

structural-functionalist) and preoccupied with social structure and order. The
key area for understanding social structure became “kinship.” For Olympian
theoreticians such as Lévi-Strauss, it was this innovation that counted:
“Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss . . . Rivers,
whose genius is largely ignored today, employed both types of interpretation
[socio-psychological and historical] simultaneously; since his time, no one has
said anything not already anticipated by that great theoretician.”88 Haddon,
Rivers, and Myers together founded Cambridge ethnographic anthropology
between 1898 and 1921: Haddon became lecturer (1900) and then reader
(1909) in Ethnology; a Diploma in Anthropology was established in 1908 and
the persuasiveness of the prestige of Rivers’s achievements led the university
to establish a new Tripos in Anthropology in 1913, taking its students for the
first time in 1920–21.
Rivers’s “genealogical method” developed in his work with the Todas, the
Solomon Island, Melanesia, and Polynesia during the first decade of the
twentieth century. A new ideal was promoted in the section Rivers wrote for
the Royal Anthropological Institute’s updated edition of Notes and Queries,89
contrasting “survey work” with what was now required—“intensive work”:
A typical piece of intensive work is one in which the worker lives for a year
or more among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and
studies every detail of their life and culture; in which he comes to know
every member of the community personally; in which he is not content
with generalized information, but studies every feature of life and custom
in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language.90
Originally introduced as a method of generating “social statistics” in a

Galtonian spirit, investigating the frequency of brother-sister exchange,
polygamy, and levirate marriage, Rivers’s method required asking all mem-
bers of a community what was their “naming relationship” to all others; it
was conceived of as a method for employing the supreme mastery of natives
in the domain of “concrete facts” to solve the “abstract problems” that natives
were not adept at addressing.91 Gradually recognizing that the answers to the
questions did not produce reliable data for drawing up patterns of “biological”
relationships, Rivers simultaneously realized that the method was increas-
ingly revelatory of the complex systems of social relationship between all
individuals in a community. The method revealed the kinship structures that
provided the social organization for “primitive society.” These kinship struc-
tures could very quickly become describable in formal terms, allowing basic
templates and rules to be generated in a quasi-algebraic fashion. This was to be
the principal method and contribution of Rivers’s Cambridge school; this very
Cambridge penchant for a formalism was why Lévi-Strauss called Rivers the
Kepler of anthropology. (He of course was to be its Einstein.) It is this contrast
between the “survey work” of teams and the “intensive work” or Haddon’s
term “fieldwork”92 of the single worker that prompts Stocking to deem this
94 John Forrester
enterprise and its associated “genealogical method” the “major methodologi-

cal innovation associated with the Cambridge School.”93
At least for Rivers and Myers, the Torres Straits Expedition had initially been
a project in comparative psychology. The findings, all hedged with qualifica-
tions, were most straightforwardly interpreted as demonstrating little if any
difference between the perceptual capacities of white Europeans and Torres
Straits islanders. These probably did form the starting-point for the antiracism
or nonracism, particularly of Rivers and Myers (in contrast to MacDougall), and
thus demonstrated a clear-cut estrangement from the evolutionist assumptions
of Victorian anthropology.94 Rivers’s surprising and infamous “conversion” to
diffusionism in 1911, developed at the same time as his call for “intensive
work” of ethnological researchers, certainly put explicit distance between his
new views and the older traditions of evolutionism. Historical contingency
replaced overarching universal laws of development. Diffusionism seemed
in some sense to point away from the intensive work in one place by one
worker that Rivers’s methodological directives recommended: yet the task
of tracking changes across geographical expanses, collating material tech-
niques, hypothesizing intersections of peoples leading to hybrid institutions
(in order to explain anomalous kinship organizations or amalgamated archi-
tectural styles, for example) required, in Rivers’s eyes, yet more fine attention
to detail, whether of vernacular nomenclature or the technological level of
“useful arts.” Rivers’s magnum opus The History of Melanesian Society (1914)
covered an enormous range of cultures, with complex histories and widely
differing social structures, occupying an area of 30° of longitude and 25° of
latitude—roughly 2.4 million square miles (or three times the size of Mexico),
“a vast Aegean under the lee of the continental mass of South-Eastern Asia,”
as Rivers’s memorialist described it.95 One could not be much further from the
study of a circumscribed group of perhaps three hundred people who share
one language and one way of life—the ideal Rivers offered his profession and
which they roundly endorsed, particularly in word but also in deed.
Rivers’s public support for Freudism in 1917 not only provided some sort
of “cover” for doctors engaging with Freud’s theories for the purpose of psy-
chological therapies with the war neuroses; he also promoted the very wide
deployment of Freudian ideas for the use of “the teacher, the politician, the
moralist, the sociologist.”96 So it was natural that the next phase of Rivers’s
engagement with psychoanalysis was his extension of Freud’s ideas into his
other home terrain, that of ethnology. This possibility—was there a path from
Freudian psychology to ethnology, or was there, as he felt, a conflict between
his interests in each of these two areas (“my growing interest in the psycho-
logical problems suggested by war-neurosis began to compete and conflict with
my interest in ethnology”97)?—was the problem that, initially unbeknownst to
the dreamer, was examined in his own dream life as he tested Freudian dream
theory. In the dream of the night of March 24–25, 1917, “hidden sources”
referred both to Rivers’s theory of the reconstruction of forgotten histories for
Melanesian stone-carving practices and kinship terms and to the “unconscious
experience which bulks so largely in the Freudian psychology.”98 The triumph
of his dream analysis was that it solved this problem, this personal problem.
Rivers’s revised dream theory would eventually reject the universal claim of
Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory and replace it with a view that dreams are
“the attempted solutions of conflicts.”99 The particular conflict on which he
based his revision of Freud’s theory was his own conflict between the “egoistic
motive which urged me not only to go on with my ethnological work, but
also to avail myself of an opportunity to demolish opponents” and the “more
altruistic motive that it was now my business [i.e., duty] to understand and
apply the principles of psycho-therapy.”100 In sleep Rivers paved the way for a
resolution of the conflict that waking life could not arrive at:
I came to see that that there was no real conflict between ethnology and
psychology, but that the two studies are mutually helpful, and that such
knowledge of the two as had come to me formed an opportunity to be
utilised, and later in the year I prepared the lecture Dreams and Primitive
Culture, which forms the first of a series of papers in which I have dealt
with the extensive border-region between psychology and ethnology.101
What diffusionism thus made important for Rivers was the subtle interpre-
tation of minute details in order to facilitate the reconstruction of hypotheti-
cal historical movements. The ethnologist was to take the form of a weapon
as it presented itself in a series, or the exact pattern of marriage rules, and
reconstruct the interaction of peoples, the shift in social institutions as a
result of recent warfare, of bride bartering, of commercial transactions of a
precious material or a novel foodstuff. The grand scale of diffusionist specula-
tion went hand in hand with an acute awareness of the subtle interpretative
skills required of the ethnologist. This shift in the kaleidoscope of Rivers’s
scientific interests would provide the necessary background to create a new
version of psychological anthropology, very different from the comparative
experimentalism undertaken on the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898. In the
lecture he mentions in his dream analysis (delivered in Manchester in April
1918), Rivers found the perfect confluence between psychoanalysis and eth-
nology: the dream mechanisms discovered by Freud—dramatization, sym-
bolization, condensation, and displacement—provide the tailor-made grid of
interpretation for both psychoanalyst and ethnologist.
Wholly independently of one another, two groups of students [of early

culture and Freud and his followers] concerned with widely different
aspects of human behaviour have been led by the facts to adopt an almost
identical standpoint and closely similar methods of inquiry. Both agree
in basing their studies upon a thorough-going determinism according to
which it is held that every detail of the phenomena they study, whether
it be the apparently phantastic and absurd incident of a dream, or to our
eyes the equally phantastic and ridiculous rite or custom of the savage,
has its definite historical antecedents and is only the final and highly-
condensed product of a long and complex chain of events. In this matter
of condensation we meet a fundamental problem of those sciences which
deal with human behaviour, whether individual or collective.102
96 John Forrester
This confluence of the two disciplines is based on a thorough-going deter-

minism coupled with the greatest respect for every detail of history, whether
documented or reconstructed. Crucially Rivers had set out an architecture for
the consilience of the two fields: from now, empirical investigations in one
could give indirect support to the other—and vice versa.
Rivers was not alone in this program of rapprochement between psychoa-
nalysis (or “the new psychology”) and anthropology, as George Stocking has
magisterially demonstrated:
As Rivers and others were so evidently aware, traditional British psychology

had been called into question along a number of lines: the irrational, the
instinctive, the abnormal, the pathological, the collective. Foreshadowed
in the work of William James and in the psychic research movement,
prefigured in the social psychologies of Graham Wallas and William
McDougall . . . , catalyzed by the experiences of World War I, which opened
the way for a serious consideration of Freud, the reorientation of British
psychology seemed to Rivers and others to provide the basis for a new
relationship of anthropology and psychology.103
With Rivers’s sudden death, this program was unexpectedly transformed by

his replacement as the intellectual leader of British anthropology, Bronislaw
Malinowski who, despite his manifest and self-declared great debt to Freud,
would later be recalled more for his rejection rather than incorporation of
psychoanalysis on behalf of the discipline he did so much to professional-
ize. Malinowski was acutely aware of Rivers’s legacy, not least because his
former supervisor, Rivers’s close colleague Seligman, fed him Rivers’s work
while he was in the field, with directives to start analyzing the dreams of
the natives.104 Malinowski’s forum for publication was the Cambridge gen-
eral psychological house-journal, Psyche (Odgen’s journal once he had closed
down the Cambridge Magazine in 1920), in the early- to mid-1920s, where he
was invited to replace Rivers as ethnographic expert as soon as Rivers had
died. In bold contrast to Rivers’s distaste for sexuality, Malinowski’s tribute
to psychoanalysis was to place sexuality at the heart of the project of psycho-
logical anthropology. While recognizing, like Rivers, the genius of Freud and
the fertility of psychoanalytic ideas, Malinowski was gleefully critical—again
like Rivers but in his own triumphantly ill-mannered, decidedly swashbuck-
ling style—of the Freudian project to found a universal anthropology on the
Oedipus complex. Malinowski repeated the ambivalence of Rivers: praising
psychoanalysis for numerous fundamental correct innovations (its emphasis
on sex, its account of infantile sexuality, its attempt to articulate a theory
of the relation of biological instinct, psychology, and social structure—the
list was extensive and repeated) while ridiculing some of the fundamental
psychoanalytic hypotheses—most famously, the centrality and cultural uni-
versality of the Oedipus complex. Both Rivers and Malinowski repeatedly
acknowledged the “genius” of Freud; both Rivers and Malinowski mounted
fierce critiques, based on their ethnographic expertise, of key features of
psychoanalysis. Their contemporaries, for their own reasons, heard only the
criticisms, not the admiration. Once Malinowski had put the boot into psy-
choanalysis, the way was clear for Radcliffe-Brown to expunge all psychology
from the nascent field of social anthropology, perfectly summed up in his
suggestion to his publisher in 1931, when preparing the second edition of
Andaman Islanders, that the word “sociology” should be substituted every-
where he had previously used the word “psychology.”105
The distinguished historian of medicine Erwin Ackerknecht observed in
1942:
In 1911 as an established authority in anthropology, [Rivers] could only

undermine his position when he professed diffusionism in his presidential
address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association. After
almost 30 years of successful work in the field of experimental psychol-
ogy, he had a reputation to lose when he professed Freudian ideas in 1916.
Nevertheless he did. The results of these conversions may be appreciated
quite differently, but no one can resist the charm of the “Faustian” attitude
which is the very kernel and the goal of our own occidental culture.106
This arresting use of “Faustian” points to the roving and unending quest for
knowledge in so many fields, which was Rivers’s way. (Who else would give
up experimental psychology the moment his close friend had built him the
best Psychological Laboratory in the country?) Rivers’s Faustian fearlessness
has immediate echoes with the Viennese Freud, who reflected in 1929 to Lou
Andreas-Salomé: “My worst qualities, including a certain indifference towards
the world, have no doubt had the same share in the end result as my good
ones, e.g., a defiant courage in the search for truth.” Rivers possessed this same
courage in pursuit of the truth. But his “search” required geographical wan-
dering. His first medical job was as a ship’s surgeon. In the 1890s he was a peri-
patetic university student and teacher, shuttling between London, Cambridge,
and the German universities. His almost accidental presence on the Torres
Straits Expedition was the equivalent of Freud’s self-analysis as a mind- and
career-changing experience. Once introduced to ethnographic work in the
Torres Straits, he shuttled between Cambridge and India (1901–1902), the
Solomon Islands and Melanesia (1907–1908) and the New Hebrides (1914–15).
Even during the war he was restless—from the South Seas to Cambridge then
Liverpool then to Hampstead via Edinburgh. The same restless adventurous-
ness led him to roam the world, to open up new scientific lines of enquiry and
alight on new problems, generating new techniques and conceptual schemata.
Freud’s declaration, in a moment of profound self-doubt in 1900, that he was
“nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with
all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort,”107
revealed that he had wanted to have a life like Rivers’s. In the end, he did:
his roving adventurousness manifested itself in the same encyclopedic rang-
ing over disciplines as Rivers’s—expertise in neurology, psychiatry, neuro-
physiology, psychopathology, theoretical biology, folklore (Volkskunde), and
98 John Forrester
ethnology were the shared ones. Most obviously and critically, they were both
profoundly influenced by Hughlings Jackson’s program in evolutionary neu-
rophysiology, so that Rivers’s distinction between protopathic and epicritic
is immediately recognizable as a close cousin of Freud’s distinction between
primary and secondary processes.108 For Freud, there was also sexology and
a deep acquaintance with world literature; for Rivers, there was also the geo-
graphical specificity inherent in ethnographic fieldwork, as well as sensory
physiology, especially vision. Yet there is one glaring difference between the
two men: while Rivers roamed in the style of European adventurers, taking
full advantage of the opportunities supplied by British imperial hegemony,
truly putting a girdle round about the earth, Freud was resolutely immobile,
voluntarily chained to his medical practice, his family, and his consulting
room. The Freudian adventure is a “voyage autour de ma chambre.”
Despite his enthusiasm for and courage in championing the Freudian cause,
after the war Rivers had distinctly mixed views of psychoanalysis. He insisted
that some of his friends in trouble seek out a psychoanalyst (e.g., Mansfield
Forbes, part of the same Cambridge circle as Sassoon, complaining “I rarely
go to bed without apprehensions of this tormenting vitality, the only release
from which is liver-deadening enlivening drink? or sexual fantasies leading
to orgasms’”109); he set John Rickman on the path to be an analyst by insist-
ing he seek analysis with Freud110; Rivers and Jones worked closely together
in the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society111; in April 1919,
Rivers was the first person to become an associate member of the British
Psycho-Analytical Society (BPaS), having invited himself, and he spoke to Jones
in 1920 of inviting Freud to Cambridge; Rickman mediated a fruitful relation-
ship between Rivers and the psychoanalytic anthropologist Géza Róheim.112
But Rivers was very disappointed by the “mythical” instinct-theory of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle113 and, as he explained to Jones, his long-standing aversion
to transference had by 1921 taken on great weight: “I am becoming progres-
sively more and more doubtful [what to make] of psychoanalysis, as at present
[conducted], especially as to [illegible] and its production of undue depend-
ence and loss of critical faculty, and consequently have taken a great dislike to
undertaking any kind of responsibility in connection with it.”114 Rivers was in
flight again, but still committed to the psychoanalytic project: he was intend-
ing to attend the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Berlin
in September 1922; Rickman hoped that meeting Freud there would entice
Rivers into having an analysis with him.
When C. S. Myers, Rivers’s longtime colleague and builder of Cambridge
psychology, gave an overview of Rivers’s career following his sudden death in
1922, he noted that Rivers had given up teaching experimental psychology in
1907, leaving Myers a free hand in that field, and had devoted himself to his
ethnology until he arrived at Maghull, where he became a transformed man:
The period beginning in July 1915 is characterized by a distinct change

in Rivers’s personality. In investigating the psychoneuroses he was ful-
filling the desires of his youth. Perhaps because of the gratified desire of
an opportunity for more sympathetic insight into the mental life of his
fellows, he became another and far happier man. Diffidence gave place
to confidence, hesitation to certainty, reticence to outspokenness, a some-
what laboured literary style to one remarkable for its ease and charm. Not
only did he win the gratitude and affection of numberless nerve-shattered
soldier patients, but he attracted all kinds of people to this new aspect of
psychology. Painters, poets, authors, artisans, all came to recognize the
value of his work, to seek, to win, and to appreciate his sympathy and his
friendship.115
Myers gives as broad a hint as he felt able that, in his Freudian moment, Rivers
had found what he had been seeking all his life. The “new psychology”—
Freudian psychology—not only was the fulfillment of his youthful desires but
it was also transformative in the present. Rivers underwent something like a
self-analysis—in his dreams and in his relations with his soldier-patients. For
two years in his maturity (1916–17), at Maghull and Craiglockhart, Rivers
practiced as a physician and allowed himself to adopt the scientific style of
Freud—an adventurous researcher engaged in intense therapeutic relation-
ships with patients. But Rivers did not stay long, seduced away at the end of
1917 by Henry Head—again—into another great adventure of the age, flying.
For Rivers, in the end, the adventure would always be outer-directed. And in
clear contrast to that archetypal hedgehog Freud, Rivers was always a fox.
Charles Myers may have been asking himself the question, “Could Rivers
have become Freud?,” when in 1926 he gave a magisterial, insightful, and
waspish overview of Freud’s scientific contributions. Full of admiration for
Freud’s genius, aghast at his incessant speculative forays, he measured Freud
against his own—and Rivers’s—experience of psychology:
Freud himself is not a trained psychologist. Had he been, it is quite pos-

sible that his developing genius would have been so stunted by the (now
superseded) psychological doctrines of his day, that his brilliant contribu-
tions to the subject—of such varying worth—would have been altogether
denied to us. Contempt is often nature’s cloak for ignorance, but it is
not altogether unjustifiable, because of the errors of its youth, that Freud
despises or ignores current psychology. Of him the psychologist might say
what Dostoievsky, so I have read, once said of himself: “I am called a psy-
chologist. It is wrong. I am simply a realist in the higher sense of the word;
that is, I depict all the dim recesses of the human soul.”116
Implicit in this meditation is the counterfactual: what if, like Freud, Rivers
had avoided the embrace of “the (now superseded) psychological doc-
trines,” “the older academic, ‘abstract’, Teutonic, experimental psychology,”
whose doctrines concerning memory were totally vitiated by its disdain for
emotion?117 Freud escaped from academic psychiatry and overly mechanis-
tic neurophysiology by a daily confrontation with suffering patients, while
Rivers’s escape route was to throw himself into the embrace of primitive peo-
ples. Rivers’s eventual return and qualified espousal of Freudianism showed
what might have been; it showed what happened to the English Freud.
100 John Forrester
Notes
1. James Strachey, “General Preface,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and
Unpublished Drafts, Standard Edition, 1 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, 1966), xiii–xxvi, at xix.
2. L. E. Shore, “W. H. R. Rivers,” The Eagle (1923), 2–14 at 9; Alan Costall, “Dire Straits:
The Divisive Legacy of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition,” Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35.4 (1999), 345–358; W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and
Dream (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923), 86, hereafter abbreviated as CD.
3. In Cambridge, a praelector is a college fellow who formally presents students during
their matriculation and the graduation ceremony—it is a strictly ceremonial role with
no other duties. Rivers’s appointment to this specially created role for Natural Science
students was an invitation for him to do as he thought fit.
4. For biographical information on Rivers, the best source is still Richard Slobodin,
W.H.R. Rivers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
5. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusion: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995); and “W.H.R. Rivers and the War Neuroses,” Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35.4 (1999), 359–378.
6. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1962).
7. Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991); The Eye in the Door (London: Viking,
1993); The Ghost Road (London: Viking, 1995).
8. CD, 5.
9. Rivers’s student Myers was cofounder of the Cambridge Laboratory; see John Forrester,
“1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London: Myers, Jones and
MacCurdy,” Psychoanalysis and History 10.1 (2008), 38–43, 45–47.
10. L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940 (London: Methuen,
1964), 180; Cyril Burt, Psychologist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 26;
Colin Crampton, The Cambridge School. The Life, Work and Influence of James Ward,
W.H.R. Rivers, C.S. Myers and Sir Frederic Bartlett, PhD, University of Edinburgh, 1978,
142; Forrester, “1919,” 37–94.
11. John Forrester, “Remembering and Forgetting Freud in Early Twentieth Century
Dreams,” Science in Context 19.1 (2006), 65–85.
12. CD, 7. Dated by one of the associations for the initial “Presidency” dream to a copy of
the British Medical Journal for December 2, 1916 (CD, 14n).
13. W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1920), 159–160.
14. The particular battles Rivers may have had in mind in early 1917 were the seven-
teenth International Medical Congress held in London in August 1913, when Janet had
attacked Freud, who was defended by Ernest Jones; and a tempestuous series of papers
and rejoinders in January–May 1916 in The Lancet on the topic of psychoanalysis when
senior alienists (Mercier, Armstrong-Jones, and Donkin) had clashed with William
Brown, Ernest Jones, and G. Elliot Smith, a clash that produced the first usage in print
I have been able to establish of “psycho-anal-ists.”
15. Tracey Loughran, “Shell-Shock and Psychological Medicine in First World War Britain,”
Social History of Medicine 22.1 (2009), 88.
16. C. S. Myers, “The Influence of the Late W.H.R. Rivers,” in W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology
and Politics and Other Essays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1923), 169.
17. The start date is mentioned by Karin Stephen in a letter to her mother, August 9, 1919,
BPaS Archives: KS/40.
18. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 8.
19. Ibid., 11.
20. Ibid., 13.
21. Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and
Freud,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999), 65–100.
22. CD, 7.
23. Ibid., 16. Some of Rivers’s psychoanalytic contemporaries were alert to the personal
resonances of the theme of water for him, as can be seen in a letter from John Rickman
to Géza Róheim, dated April 22, 1922: “When you reply to Rivers On Baptism (note:
Rivers = Water-Birth) please deal gently but firmly with him. I know from personal
knowledge that Rivers-Birth Phantasies is a personal complex of his & one can be firm
& kind without hammering on his raw nerves” (Archives, BPaS, CRR/FO8/30.) It should
also be noted that Rivers’s full name was William Halse Rivers Rivers—the repetition
of “Rivers” was said to be the result of a vicar’s confusion at the baptismal font, so yet
another watery “myth”; the full context of the “Presidency” dream includes the fact
that his maternal uncle James Hunt was the founder and first president in 1863 of the
Anthropological Society.
24. Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell. The Spirit of Solitude (London: Vintage, 1997), 495–496.
25. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 138.
26. CD, 117.
27. Ibid., 41.
28. Philip Sargant Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (eds.), C.K. Ogden: a Collective Memoir
(London: Elek Pemberton, 1977); Damon Franke, Modernist Heresies. British Literary
History, 1883–1924,(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
29. CD, 117.
30. Ibid., 118.
31. Ibid., 120. The attack on the Magazine ’s “pacifism” began on February 24 and a vigor-
ous defense was published on March 17 and 24.
32. CD, 121.
33. Ibid., 122.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 122–123.
36. Ibid., 123–124.
37. Ibid., 125–126.
38. Ibid., 170.
39. Ibid., 167.
40. Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895–1926 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986); Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon. The Making of
a War Poet. A Biography (1886–1918) (London: Duckworth, 1998).
41. Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Folio Society, 1974 [1936]), 13.
42. Sassoon’s principal contacts with the Magazine were Edward Dent, the musicologist,
who initially advised Sassoon in early 1916 to publish in the Magazine, and A. T. (Theo)
Bartholomew, under-librarian at the University Library, both part of a homosexual
circle in Cambridge. Being a regular reader of the Magazine, Rivers would have seen
these (e.g., “A Subaltern,” on February 24, 1917; “The Optimist,” April 21, 1917; “Base
Details,” April 28, 1917; “News from the Front,” June 2, 1917; “Supreme Sacrifice” and
‘In an Underground Dressing-Station,” June 9, 1917). The Magazine produced a sepa-
rately sold pamphlet entitled “To Any Officer,” containing Sassoon’s “To Any Dead
Officer” in August 1917. Four poems published in the Magazine in 1917 were also pub-
lished by Ogden in pamphlet form in January 1918 (“Dreamers,” “Does It Matter?,”
“Base Details,” and “Glory of Women”). Some of these poems were not published in
the collections Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) and War Poems (1919) that made
Sassoon immediately famous as a war poet. See Wilson, Sassoon. The Making of a War
Poet ; and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon. The Journey from the Trenches. A
Biography (1918–1967) (London: Duckworth, 2003).
43. Siegfried Sassoon, “Supreme Sacrifice,” Cambridge Magazine, June 9, 1917, 691.
44. CD, 168.
45. Ibid., 170.
46. Ibid., 167.
47. Ibid., 168.
48. Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 13.
102 John Forrester
49. Ibid., 168.

50. Ibid., 170.
51. Ibid., 175.
52. Wilson, Sassoon. The Journey from the Trenches, 29.
53. CD, 81.
54. The most peculiar and confusing of these was Rivers’s decision to reserve the term
“repression” for “the process by which we wittingly endeavour to banish experience
from consciousness” (Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 17), proposing the term
“suppression” for “unwitting” elimination. In other words, Rivers interchanged the
meaning of the (Freudian) terms “suppression” and “repression.” For “unwissentlich”—
see W. H. R. Rivers, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits,
Vol. II Physiology and Psychology. Part I Introduction and Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1901), 6–7. For Jones’s acute comments, see E. J. [Ernest Jones], “Instinct
and the Unconscious. A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses: By
W. H. R. Rivers, M.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., (Cambridge University Press, 1920. Pp. 252. Price
10s. 6d.),” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1920), 475.
55. Frederick Bartlett, “Review. W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream,” Mind 33 No. 129 (1924), 94.
56. E. J. [Ernest Jones], “Review, Rivers, Conflict and Dream,” International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 4 (1923), 499.
57. Siegfried Sassoon, War Diaries. 1915–1918, ed. and introd. Rupert Hart-Davies (London:
Faber & Faber, 1983), 183; Patrick Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 152.
58. Sassoon, War Diaries, 192.
59. Ibid., 193–194.
60. Sassoon to Graves, December 7, 1917; Sassoon, War Diaries, 196.
62. Ibid., 204
63. Siegfried Sassoon, War Poems (London: Heinemann, 1919) 75; see Campbell, Siegfried
Sassoon, 151–161.
64. W. H. R. Rivers and Henry Head, “A Human Experiment in Nerve Division,” Brain 31.3
(1908), 324.
65. W. H. R. Rivers, The Influence of Alcohol and Other Drugs on Fatigue (London: E. Arnold,
1906), 20.
66. Ted J. Kaptchuk, “Intentional Ignorance: A History of Blind Assessment and Placebo
Controls in Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72.3 (1998), 419.
67. Ibid., 126.
68. Ibid.
69. John Forrester, “Dream Readers,” in Forrester, ed., Dispatches from the Freud Wars.
Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
1997), 138–183; John Forrester, “Introduction,” Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams,
trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2006b), vii–liv.
70. CD, 127.
71. Ibid., 35.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 36.
74. James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century
British Novels, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9–10.
75. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things ([1966] 1970) (London: Routledge, 2002), 413.
76. Rickman to Róheim, letter dated January 22, 1923, BPaS, Rickman Papers, CRR/
FO7/12. On Rickman, see Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “Tansley’s Psychoanalytic
Network: An Episode Out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England,”
Psychoanalysis and History 2.2 (2000), 192–195.
77. Ian Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology. W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge
Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898–1931 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981),
52 & 340n7.
78. Jeremy MacClanchy, “Unconventional Character and Disciplinary Convention: John

Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Malinowski,
Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays on Culture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 50–71.
79. John Layard, “Autobiography: History of a Failure,” c. 1967– (Ms., John Willoughby
Layard Papers, 1897–1974, University of California at San Diego, Mandeville Special
Collections Library), 115–116.
81. Ibid.
82. Forrester, “1919,” 52–56.
83. W. H. R. Rivers, “President’s Inaugural address. Medical Section, British Psychological
Society,” The Lancet (May 24, 1919), 892.
84. CD, 110.
85. Ibid., 111.
86. Ibid.
87. Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists. The Modern British School, 2nd revised edi-
tion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ix; Michael North, Reading 1922. A Return to
the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42; George W. Stocking, Jr.,
After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1995), 271. Radcliffe-Brown, who came up to Cambridge in 1901 and took the Moral
Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1904 and 1905, was very much Rivers’s student until
their estrangement before the war (Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology,
244–300). Langham argues vigorously that Radcliffe-Brown’s self-presentation as entirely
indebted to Durkheim for his advocacy of the structural-functionalist method conceals
the fact that, in the period 1912–14 he developed this method explicitly as an extension
of Rivers’s work. Rivers was then systematically excluded from the discipline-founding
accounts by later students of Radcliffe-Brown’s. Malinowski was formally Seligman’s
student, but looked to Rivers as the unquestioned leader of British anthropology (see
Stocking, After Tylor, 267–268; Michael W. Young, Malinowski. Odyssey of an anthropologist,
1884–1920 [London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004], pp. 88, 161–162, 165,
233–237, 245, 251, 265, 349–350, 369, 373, 408, 558–559 passim).
88. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual-Organizations Exist?” (1956), in Structural Anthropology
[1958], trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (London: Penguin, 1972),
162–163.
89. James Urry, “‘Notes and Queries on Anthropology’ and the Development of Field
Methods in British Anthropology, 1870–1920,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland no.1972 (1972), 45–57.
90. W. H. R. Rivers, “Anthropological Research Outside America,” in Reports on the Present
Condition and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology (Washington: Carnegie Inst.
[Publ. 200], 1913), 7.
91. W. H. R. Rivers, “A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics,”
J. Anthrop. Inst. 30 (1900), 82; Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology,
64–93; Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology,
1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 140–149.
92. George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology
from Tylor to Malinowski,” in Stocking, ed., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays
in the History of Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 27;
Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, “Introduction: Cambridge and the Torres Strait,” in
Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, eds., Cambridge and the Torres Strait. Centenary Essays on
the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
93. Stocking, After Tylor, 112.
94. Graham Richards, “Getting a Result: The Expedition’s Psychological Research
1898–1913,” in Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, 136–157; Graham
Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (London: Routledge,
1997).
104 John Forrester
95. J. L. Myres, “W.H.R. Rivers,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain
and Ireland 53 (January–June 1923), 16.
96. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 160; see also W. H. R. Rivers, “Sociology and
Psychology,” Sociological Review 9 (1916), 1–13 and “An Address on Education and
Mental Hygiene” [1922], in Psychology and Politics and Other Essays, with a Prefatory
Note by G. Elliot Smith and an Appreciation by C. S. Myers (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1923), 95–106.
97. CD, 132.
98. Ibid., 131.
99. Ibid., 136.
100. Ibid., 134.
101. Ibid.
102. W. H. R. Rivers, Dreams and Primitive Culture. A Lecture Delivered in the John Rylands
Library on the 10th April 1918, reprinted from The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
4.3–4 (February–July 1918), 14.
103. Stocking, After Tylor, 243–244.
104. George W. Stocking, Jr., “Anthropology and the Science of the Irrational: Malinowski’s
Encounter with Freudian Psychoanalysis,” in George W.Stocking, Jr., ed., Malinowski,
Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays on Culture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 29–31.
105. George W. Stocking, Jr., “Books Unwritten, Turning Points Unmarked. Notes for an
Anti-History of Anthropology” [1981], in Stocking, Delimiting Anthropology. Occasional
Essays and Reflections (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 344.
106. Erwin Ackerknecht, “In Memory of William H. R. Rivers, 1864–1922,” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 11 (1942), 481.
107. Sigmund Freud, “Letter from Freud to Fliess, February 1, 1900,” in J. M. Masson, ed.,
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 397.
108. John Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1980);
R. G. Goldstein, “The Higher and Lower in Mental Life: An Essay on J. Hughlings
Jackson and Freud,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 43 (1995),
495–515; Young, The Harmony of Illusions.
109. Hugh Carey, Mansfield Forbes and his Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 42.
110. Sylvia Payne, “Dr. John Rickman” Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 33 (1952), 54.
111. Forrester, “1919,” 52.
112. See the Rickman-Róheim correspondence, BPaS, Rickman Papers, CRR/FO7 and CRR/
FO8.
113. Rivers to Ernest Jones, November 21, 1921, BPaS, Jones Papers, CRB/F01/01.
114. Rivers to Ernest Jones, November 27, 1921, BPaS, Jones Papers, CRB/F01/02.
115. Myers, “The Influence of the Late W.H.R. Rivers,” 167–168.
116. C. S. Myers, “A Lecture on Freudian Psychology,” The Lancet 207.5364 (June 19, 1926),
1183.
117. C. S. Myers, Present-Day Applications of Psychology, With Special Reference to Industry,
Education and Nervous Breakdown (London: Methuen, 1918), 28.
5
European Witness: Analysands
Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s
Laura Marcus
The emigration, voluntary or enforced, of psychoanalysts from central Europe

to Britain and the United States from the 1930s onward has been explored
in depth and detail over the last decades, with important work on, among
related topics, “Freud in exile.”1 Less fully documented and explored are the
experiences, in the 1920s and 1930s, of those British analysands and training
analysts who traveled to Vienna, Berlin, or Budapest in order to be analyzed
by “the masters,” including Freud in Vienna, Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest,
and Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs in Berlin. While it is recognized that this
was a familiar pattern in the training of early British analysts, the particu-
larities of their experiences abroad (as well as those of analysands who were
“patients” rather than “pupils,” to use Freud’s distinction) appear not to have
been a significant focus of interest. This chapter is a preliminary exploration
of this topic, and focuses on the activities of the Stracheys, particularly Alix
Strachey, and of the writers Bryher and H.D., in the Berlin of the mid-1920s
and the Berlin and Vienna of the late 1920s and early 1930s, respectively.
Psychoanalysis developed as an international movement in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, with the first International Psycho-Analytic
Congress, held in Salzburg in 1908, attended by participants from America
(A. A. Brill), Austria, England (Ernest Jones and Wilfred Trotter), Germany,
Hungary, and Switzerland. (Of the 40 participants named by Ernest Jones,
there is only one woman, Frieda Gross, wife of the analyst Otto Gross, from
Austria.2) Jones also notes the occurrence of the first training analysis in 1907,
that of Max Eitingon by Freud.3 Jones himself was a very frequent visitor to
Vienna, in these early years and beyond; David Eder, with Jones, one of the
first medical doctors to use psychoanalysis in his treatment, came to Vienna
for a three-week analysis in early 1913, though Freud, too busy with other
patients to take him on, referred him to Viktor Tausk.4 In 1913, Eder also
105
106 Laura Marcus
became the secretary of the newly founded Branch Society in London of the
International Association of Psychoanalysis, with Jones as president.
World War I was a period of retrenchment and restricted travel for psy-
choanalysts, but after the war, and with the extreme conditions of recession
in Austria and Germany, it became a matter of necessity for Freud and other
analysts to take on as many British and American patients and pupils, who
could pay in hard currency, as possible. It was understood that these ana-
lysands would also facilitate the international dissemination of psychoana-
lytic thought and teaching. From the beginning of the 1920s, Freud took,
in Jones’s words, “fewer patients, there being so many pupils, mainly from
America and England, who wished to learn his technique.”5 In 1922 Freud
established the practice of inviting a number of analysts (in the first year,
Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, Géza Róheim, and Hanns Sachs) to come
to Vienna to deliver lectures on theoretical topics, to supplement the work
undertaken in individual training analyses.
Among the British who undertook analysis in Europe were James and Alix
Strachey and Edward Glover, who went for training at the newly established
Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1921, and for analysis with Karl Abraham,
also Alix Strachey’s analyst in Berlin in the mid-1920s. The institute, devoted
to providing free analysis to patients who could not pay and making training
analysis an essential part of its very substantial educational program, received
a large number of foreign visitors for shorter or longer periods and became, in
the words of the Norwegian Ola Raknes, “the central site for psychoanalytic
education.”6 Abraham initiated the lecture program, to which Sachs made a
substantial contribution, along with Horney, Ernst Simmel, and others, and
visitors including the Hungarian anthropologist and analyst Géza Róheim.
Edward Glover’s brother James, who became James Strachey’s analyst,
was also analyzed by Abraham in Berlin. James Glover had taken over the
Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square in 1918. The first British
institution devoted to psychotherapy, including psychoanalytic methods, it
was founded in 1913 by Jessie Murray, a doctor and Suffragist, along with
her companion Julia Turner, and with the financial and administrative
involvement of the novelist May Sinclair. By 1917 it was substantially treat-
ing shell-shocked soldiers with various forms of physical and psychothera-
peutic treatments, but the need for more psychoanalysts became pressing. For
a few years the Medico-Psychological Clinic coexisted alongside the London
Psycho-Analytic Society, set up by Dr. Ernest Jones in 1913, but it was this
organization that finally replaced the clinic after Jessie Murray’s death in
1920.
As Suzanne Raitt notes in her biography of May Sinclair, the “clinic
was quietly repressed from psychoanalytic histories and from analysts’
autobiographies.”7 The Glovers—who became members of the British
Psycho-Analytical Society—and Ernest Jones were soon engaged in fierce
battles with the British medical establishment to defend the legitimacy of
psychoanalysis. The eclectic nature of the institution where so many of their
associates had been trained would not have helped their cause, nor would it
European Witness 107
have legitimized British psychoanalysis in the broader European and US psy-

choanalytic arenas. The controversy over lay analysis (i.e., the legitimacy or
otherwise of nonmedically trained analysts), for example, was intense in the
early 1920s. Raitt also suggests that their cause would not have been helped
by the “dominance in the movement of so many outspoken, intellectual—
even, in the case of Murray and Turner, possibly lesbian—women.”8
The occlusion of the clinic from psychoanalytic histories becomes striking
when one observes that almost all the most familiar names in early British
psychoanalysis were trained there and received their first analysis from Julia
Turner. They included James Glover, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Mary Chadwick,
Marjorie Brierley, Nina Searl, Sylvia Payne, and Susan Isaacs. A number of
these analysts also went abroad for analysis and training. In addition to James
and Edward Glover’s analyses with Abraham in Berlin, Ella Freeman Sharpe,
Sylvia Payne, Barbara Low, and Mary Chadwick, the first child-analyst in
Britain, were analyzed in Berlin by Hanns Sachs. (Sharpe and Low were ear-
lier analyzed by Ernest Jones.) Joan Riviere took a different route—she was
analyzed first by Jones and subsequently by Freud in Vienna.
Paul Roazen records that “Edward Glover remembered Miss Sharpe in
Germany walking along with lilies in her bosom, holding them as if they were
a child.”9 Sharpe, who had started her career as an English teacher and cohead
of a Pupil Teacher’s Training Centre, came to the Medico-Psychological Clinic
in 1917, and went on to analysis with Sachs in Berlin in 1920. She went back
as a student to Sachs and to Berlin at frequent intervals and it was she who
arranged for Sachs to visit London in 1924 in order to give the lecture series
more famously given by Melanie Klein in Adrian and Karin Stephen’s house
in 1925—the year before Klein moved permanently to England. (Sharpe
became the analyst of Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, in 1926.)
Hanns Sachs, born in Vienna in 1881, initially trained as a lawyer. In 1904,
he came to psychoanalysis through his reading of The Interpretation of Dreams.
He abandoned his law career in its early stages and followed Freud into psy-
choanalytic work, initially through writing and editing and, from 1920
onward, through the training of analysts, when he was asked by the newly
founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute to develop the new field of training
analysis, including analyzing psychoanalysts who were already practicing.
One of Freud’s most trusted colleagues, Sachs became one of the group of
seven—the Secret Committee—around Freud. Sachs remained in Berlin until
1932, when he was invited by the Harvard School of Medicine to become a
training analyst in Boston, a function he continued until his death in 1947.
Sachs’s publications were substantially contributions to applied psychoanaly-
sis. Freud’s “dream book” remained a key text for him, as did the essay of 1908,
“Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” Fascinated by the applications of psycho-
analysis to the creative process and to the reception of works of art, and by the
concept of the work of art as a “collective day-dream,” Sachs explored the idea
of “day-dreams in common.” In 1912 Freud entrusted to Sachs and Otto Rank
the editing of the newly founded journal Imago, intended to develop the appli-
cation of psychoanalytic knowledge to broader cultural and human-scientific
108 Laura Marcus
spheres: Sachs continued this publication as The American Imago after his move
to the United States. Sachs was also involved in the film culture of Weimar
Berlin: the director G. W. Pabst was a close friend. Sachs’s cultural and aesthetic
preoccupations fed his work with British training analysts such as Ella Sharpe,
for whom language and literary representation were central to the understand-
ing of psychic life, and for whom the role of “sublimation” in creative activ-
ity was a lifelong preoccupation. Sharpe’s essays in the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis included the 1930 essay “Certain Aspects of Sublimation and
Delusion,” an exploration of the origins of, and magical thinking entailed in,
the work of art. The essay closes with a discussion of “the moving picture”:
The resources of science and art here converge in answer to man’s deepest
necessity and will consummate the most satisfying illusion the world has
known. Future generations will be able to see the past as it really was. The
great figures will move and live before them as they did even in life. They
will speak with their authentic voices. There, in that darkened theatre,
with all our knowledge and enlightenments we will not hesitate to reach
out a hand through time to the first artist, painting his bison in the dim
recesses of the cave.10
This relates in significant ways to the preoccupations of Hanns Sachs, as

well as to those of the two women writers, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and
her lifelong companion, the American-born poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to
whom Sachs became particularly close and on whom the later part of this
chapter is focused. Bryher’s analysis with Sachs was undertaken as a form of
training-analysis, although this was not pursued to completion. H.D. was
analyzed first by Mary Chadwick in London, briefly by Sachs in Berlin, and,
finally, by Freud in Vienna in 1933–34. H.D. and Bryher, like many of the
British analysts and training-analysts, were negotiating European cities in a
period of cultural and political ferment, intensifying into the 1930s, and their
experiences often brought into sharp relief the relationship between psychic
and political life. This was also a time when psychoanalytic ideas about female
sexuality, and, more particularly, female homosexuality, were being most fully
formulated. The experiences of Bryher and H.D.—who identified as lesbian
and as bisexual, respectively—in psychoanalysis, and, more particularly, in
so-called training-analyses, which might have allowed them to become ana-
lysts themselves, raises a number of issues in the history of an institution
that has for much of its history excluded lesbians and gay men from its train-
ing programs, and pathologized homosexuality itself. This then raises ques-
tions about an openness to difference possibly lost between the destruction
of German and then Austrian psychoanalysis with the rise of fascism, and its
recreation in Britain and the United States.
H.D.’s and Bryher’s extensive correspondence and the other written records,
which they kept, provide exceptional insight into the period of their analy-
ses. For H.D., in particular, the analytic hour was the central focus of her
time in Vienna, but around this there were other hours to fill and routines to
establish. The writing she produced during these periods—letters, journals,

jottings—became not only a way of recording experience but of sustaining
identity, as she organized her daily life around her “hour” and the space of
a room. She opened Tribute to Freud (1956), her retrospective account of her
analysis with Freud, with these words:
It was Vienna, 1933–1934. I had a room in the Hotel Regina, Freiheitsplatz.

I had a small calendar on my table. I counted the days and marked them
off, calculating the weeks. My sessions were limited, time went so quickly
[ . . . ] I went down Berggasse, turned in the familiar entrance, Berggasse 19,
Wien 19, it was. There were wide stone steps and a balustrade.11
H.D.’s letters from 1933 to 1934, to Bryher and to other close friends, reveal
further dimensions of the relationship she developed with Freud, and of life in
Vienna at the time in which National Socialism was rapidly taking hold. The
early 1930s was also the period in which Bryher was most extensively com-
mitted to psychoanalysis, urging friends toward it (and frequently paying for
their sessions), attending psychoanalytic lectures in Berlin and (in 1934) the
Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne.
The correspondence between H.D. and Bryher in the early 1930s raises, as
Susan Stanford Friedman notes, the question of leakage from the analytic
encounter against which Freud had warned in his 1913 essay “On Beginning
the Treatment.”12 Deliberate preparation for the analytic session was, Freud
suggested, a form of “resistance . . . [which] will see to it that the most valuable
material escapes communication.” Such withholding might also be effected
by other means. The patient “may talk over the treatment every day with
some intimate friend, and bring into this discussion all the thoughts which
should come forward in the presence of the doctor. The treatment thus has a
leak which lets through precisely what is most valuable.”13
The permeability of the border between the inside and the outside of “the
treatment” is striking in the case of H.D. and Bryher. It also raises broader
questions about the communication of material arising in the analytic
session to a third party, a topic explored by John Forrester in his work on
psychoanalysis as gossip and as telepathy, in which he discusses the exist-
ence of a “semi-permeable membrane” placed around the communication
between analyst and analysand.14 The analyst promises confidentiality to the
patient; the patient makes no such explicit assurance, but, as we have seen,
the understanding is that he or she will refrain from discussing the analy-
sis with people outside. Gossip (which is explored in this context alongside
telepathic communication, a thought transmission through “unofficial”
channels) is the illicit mode of communication both attendant upon psychoa-
nalysis and acting as threats to the attempt at discursive regulation: “[G]ossip
is the underbelly of analysis, telepathy its shadow,” while psychoanalysis is
the “science of gossip.”15 It allows, moreover, for the possibility of “gossiping
about oneself”—something that, Forrester argues, is impossible in everyday
life. The French Lacanian psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire has claimed that in
110 Laura Marcus
highly psychoanalyzed cultures, such as contemporary Paris, “the question

as to what is being said by friends and lovers on their respective couches can
take on a greater analytic significance than the traditional Oedipus complex.
The structure of gossip here replaces the family structure.”16 I will return to
these issues and to “the logic of the ménage à trois”—with psychoanalysis as
“a theory of this third party”—in connection with Bryher and H.D.17
* * *
I want first to turn, more briefly, to one of the most fully documented
experiences of the British analysand abroad: that of Alix Strachey (née
Sargeant-Florence), a number of whose letters to her husband James Strachey,
written during the period of her analysis with Karl Abraham in 1924–25, were
published in the volume Bloomsbury/Freud.18 The history of the Stracheys’
encounter with psychoanalysis bears interestingly on the question of lay
analysis in Britain. Ernest Jones, whose commitment to the medical train-
ing of analysts ran counter to Freud’s own views on the topic, had strongly
encouraged James Strachey to take up medical studies; Strachey gave up
within a month. In May 1920 Jones wrote to Freud, at James’s request, “to ask
if there is any hope of your taking him as for analysis . . . He is a man of 30,
well educated and of a well-known literary family (I hope he may assist with
translation of your works.”19 Both James and Alix Strachey were analyzed by
Freud at this time, journeying to Vienna in 1920. Their translations of Freud’s
work (on which James Strachey had in fact embarked before his first meeting
with Freud) were to occupy the rest of their lives.
In July 1921 Freud wrote to Ernest Jones: “Strachey and his wife might
become very useful to you. They are exceptionally nice and cultured peo-
ple though somewhat queer and after having gone through their analysis
(what is not yet the case) they may become serious analysts.”20 Alix’s analysis
with Freud was severely disrupted by illness—she spent several months in a
sanatorium—and in 1924 she took up analysis again, this time with Abraham
in Berlin, though this came to an abrupt end when he became seriously ill
in 1925—he died at the end of the year. James Strachey remained in London
throughout most of the period of Alix’s analysis. It was this separation that
occasioned the letters describing Alix’s life in Berlin, and James’s work as an
analyst and translator in London, as well as something of a territorial struggle
between them. Alix resisted the idea that James might come for further analy-
sis, either with Abraham in Berlin or with some other “F-S” (father-surrogate),
though he writes, rather pitifully, on November 2, 1924:
Of course, the real point is that I want one too. I mean an analysis. For
various reasons, also, besides the Lower one. Actually, I’m getting inter-
ested in the subject, & find I can’t understand it. And also, but this is a
secret of the deepest dye, I want to have a baby by you—And it seems to
me such a waste of time not to be being done while you’re away, & while,
incidentally, the motive’s probably stronger.21
Life in Berlin itself—Alix was staying in a pension some distance from the
centre—is represented by radio-cafés, ballet and theater, and dances. She came
to like and respect Hanns Sachs, but not to enjoy dancing with him: “Yesterday
I went to the Union Palais de Danse with Dr Sachs, & we, literally, hopped it
together. Ah, well; I’d give a great deal to meet a tall, immaculate Briton in
a ‘Smocking’ & glide swiftly with straight knees over an empty, uncarpeted
floor to the double rhythm of a saxophone Band . . . ”22 She wrote enthusiasti-
cally of the Russian ballet, of musical concerts and of visits to the Kino, but the
balls and café-dances were her most frequent distraction, inadequate dancing
partners notwithstanding, and one in which she was often accompanied by
Melanie Klein, dressed, as Alix noted, in the style of Cleopatra. “I had another
all-night orgy,” she wrote to James on February 9, 1925,
at the “Jury-freie” Dance. It was identical with the other Saturday (Frau Klein
as Cleo; Simmel; a conversation about ψa [psychoanalysis] with a friend-of-
the-sub editor of the Vossische [a conversative North German newspaper];
a dance or two in the rotating pack with one or two vague figures; a cup of
coffee with a be-spectacled democrat; & a glass of beer (alas, not Sekt) with a
paranoiac ex-officer nationalist whose speeches were simply incomprehen-
sible to me from beginning to end & so home, in a tram, at 7.0 a.m.).23
The letters reveal the rising influence of Klein, in analysis with Abraham at
the same time as Alix Strachey. Alix, indeed, says a good deal more about
Klein’s new theories than she does about her own analysis with Abraham, to
the content of which, and perhaps following the psychoanalytic proscription
on “the leak,” she barely refers (at least in the published letters). Her letters are,
however, full of analytic gossip—“fresh gossip,” as she terms it24 —as well as
a psychoanalytically inflected commentary on the everyday world of Berlin:
the “radio pastry shop” she frequents “is exactly like a Hitschmann diagram
of the dream-mechanism, in which the loud-speaker = the gruesome, cavern-
ous unc. & the Kontrolleur, the repressive Zensur.”25
Alix also wrote regularly to James about the lecture and discussion program
at the Berlin “Poliklinik.” In the season running from October to December
1924, she chose three lecture series from the six on offer: Sachs on “nor-
mal sexual development,” Abraham on “the history of character develop-
ment,” and Ernst Simmel on “Die Angst.” (The other series were Sándor Rádo,
“Introduction to psychoanalysis,” Franz Alexander, “Neurosis and total per-
sonality” [“Gesamtpersönlichkeit”], and Max Eitingon, Simmel, and Rádo on
“Practical training in the introduction to psychoanalytic therapy.”) The follow-
ing year she attended Rádo’s lectures on “Die Übertragung,” finding them “the
most exhilarating”: “He covers the blackboard with diagrams showing the dif-
ferent processes which take place in the structure of the mind in (1) Hypnosis
(2) Kathexis (3) Analysis . . . fiery zig-zags & concentric circles symbolizing ana-
lyst and analee . . . the result is purely Blakeian.”26
In London, James was also occupied with the psychoanalytic discussions
taking place in London and in Cambridge. He had been a member of the
112 Laura Marcus
Apostles at the University, and he now returned to Cambridge not only to

meet up with his fellow members in this dining and discussion club, but to
pursue developments in psychoanalysis with other adherents, including the
mathematician Frank Ramsey, the scientist Lionel Penrose, and the ecologist
Arthur Tansley, a number of whom had undertaken analysis with Freud in
Vienna.27 In London, the psychoanalytic discussion groups were frequently
led by the women analysts (or, in James’s parlance, “the ladies”), including
Ella Sharpe, Nina Searl, Mary Chadwick, and M. G. Lewis. Child psychoanal-
ysis was often the topic of the papers and discussion and, as James pointed
out to a reluctant Alix, might be the province for her to enter as an analyst,
given that it tended to be thought of as a suitable sphere for the nonmedically
trained (and for women). He was also extensively involved with meetings of
the “Glossary Committee” (convened to create a common lexicon of terms
between the translators of psychoanalytic texts), as he worked on the Freud
translations, which brought him into regular, and sometimes contentious,
contact with analysts including John Rickman (who had been analyzed by
Freud in Vienna between 1920 and 1922), Ernest Jones, and Joan Riviere. As
he wrote to Alix (October 9, 1924): “They want to call ‘das Es’ ‘the Id.’ I said I
thought everyone would say ‘the Yidd.’ So Jones said there was no such word
in English: ‘There’s “Yiddish,” you know. And in German “Jude.” But there is
no such word as “Yidd.”’—‘Pardon, me, doctor, Yidd is a current slang word
for a Jew.’—‘Ah! A slang expression. It cannot be in very wide-spread use
then.’—Simply because that l.b. hasn’t ever heard it.”28
James and Alix communicated on a very regular basis about the Freud trans-
lations, as they both worked on the texts for the Hogarth Press psychoanalytic
publications, inaugurated in 1924. The process of translation from German
into English becomes in some ways analogous to the process of cultural trans-
lation from one country to another. At times, Alix seems to have resisted such
acculturation. On a number of occasions, she compared Berlin social life unfa-
vorably with Bloomsbury society, and English society more generally. It is per-
haps unfair to single out one of the least appealing quotations from her letters,
but the passage, describing a visit to a bicycle race at the “Sport-Palast,” does
give a sense of her visceral, class-bound response to aspects of Berlin life:
What I really resented was being expected to look at those filthy, lower-
class figures displaying their stupid, brutalized faces and bodies; instead
of seeing lovely boys in dazzling skins & white shorts disporting them-
selves on green lawns in the open air- or at least well-bred horses canter-
ing round, or something not quite so obnoxious to the senses. But it was
interesting in its way—once.29
Food terms and analytic terms—different versions of the languages of appe-

tite and desire—invariably appear in German in Alix’s letters to James:
So now I sit, stuffed with Sunday Braten in a stuffy, solitary room . . . I meant
to tell you how exciting last night’s Sitzung had been . . . For Die Klein pro-
pounded her views and experiences on Kinderanalyse [and] demonstrated
absolutely clearly that these children . . . were already wrecked by the repres-
sion of their desires and the most appalling Schuldbewusstein (=too great, or
incorrect oppression by the Ueberich).30
Alix’s excitement about Klein’s theories is palpable throughout the letters, and
exist in strong contrast to James’s comments about the material he was listen-
ing to in London (as he wrote on March 18, 1925, “Tonight la Chadwick reads
about some child analysis or other . . . ”31). Alix was particularly impressed by
Klein’s claim that transference in child analysis could only be effected if the
analyst made clear the meaning of its symptoms and symbolic actions to the
child, though she feared that Klein would encounter opposition when she
presented the material in Vienna, not least from Anna Freud, “that open or
secret sentimentalist.”32 The terms were being set for the controversy between
Klein and Anna Freud that would dominate, and divide, the British psycho-
analytic community in the years to come.
The Stracheys, and particularly Alix, played a significant role in arrangements
for Klein’s visit to London in 1925, which was in fact the first step toward her
permanent move to England the following year. Alix helped Klein prepare the
lectures she would give in London, translating two of the series of six lectures
on child analysis, with James taking on three. In hindsight, aspects of Alix’s
admiration for Klein take on some irony, not least her approving assertion (in
the light of subsequent revelations that the “child patients” of a number of
Klein’s case studies were in fact Klein’s own children) that she “absolutely insists
on keeping parental & educative influence apart from analysis & in reducing
the former to its minimum.”33 Alix was clearly deeply invested in the success of
Klein’s reception in London, and this would seem to bear some relation to her
perception of her own roles as a mediator and as a translator, in the broadest
sense, of psychoanalytic culture between Berlin/Vienna and London. Alix’s
Berlin years were, as Barbara Caine has noted, those of her most intense public
engagement with psychoanalysis: on her return to London after Abraham’s
death she did not pursue an analytic career, though she would commit much
of the rest of her life to the work of translating Freud.34
* * *
Two years after Alix Strachey’s departure from the city, Bryher was in Berlin.
The rest of this chapter explores the Berlin and Vienna years of Bryher and the
poet H.D., Bryher’s companion from their meeting in 1918 until H.D.’s death
in 1961. H.D., born Hilda Doolittle in Pennsylvania in 1886, came to Europe
in 1911 and settled in London, becoming part of the group surrounding Ezra
Pound, and writing poetry as one of the group of “Imagist” poets. She mar-
ried the writer Richard Aldington, but the marriage broke down during World
War I; a brief affair with the composer Cecil Gray resulted in her pregnancy,
and her daughter, Perdita, was born in 1919. Ill and isolated at the end of the
war, she was supported by a young woman, who called herself “Bryher,” who
had contacted her after reading H.D.’s first collection of poems, Sea Garden. In
the 1920s H.D. continued to write poetry and a series of semiautobiographical
114 Laura Marcus
novels, often using the background of Classical Greece, and frequently replay-
ing in these narratives earlier episodes of sexual passion—lesbian and hetero-
sexual—and the traumas of loss and betrayal. She entered into psychoanalysis
in the early 1930s—this culminated in her analysis with Freud in Vienna in
1933 and 1934.
Bryher is a lesser-known figure. She was born in 1894 as Annie Winifred
Ellerman, the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate and fin-
ancier who, on his death in 1933, was named as the richest man in Britain.
She spent much of her early life traveling the world with her parents. She
married twice—primarily to gain independence from her family—but was
for the most part open about her lesbianism. She wrote throughout her life—
beginning with fictionalized autobiographies and ending with historical
novels. She was also extensively engaged with numerous publishing projects,
including acting as coeditor of the film journal Close Up, which ran from 1927
to 1933—the years of the transition from silent to sound film. The editor of
the journal was Kenneth Macpherson, a young Scottish artist with whom
H.D. had fallen in love (he was some 20 years her junior), and whom Bryher
married, ostensibly to provide a front for H.D.’s liaison, more probably as
a way of making sure she was not excluded from the ménage. Bryher and
Macpherson legally adopted H.D.’s daughter at this time.
In the late 1920s and into the early 1930s Bryher, H.D., and Macpherson
were intensively involved in writing about film and in filmmaking itself.
Close Up made a significant impact during the few years of its publication,
drawing on a wide international group of writers and publishing, for exam-
ple, the first English-language versions of Eisenstein’s film writings. There is
a complete version of only one of the four films they made, Borderline —H.D.
was their central actress. In the late 1930s Bryher bought the ailing journal
Life and Letters, turning it into Life and Letters To-Day and supporting its trans-
formation from Bloomsbury belletrism to internationalism and a far broader
cultural remit. Before and during World War II, she financially supported a
number of the victims of the fascist regimes, including Walter Benjamin, and
acted to help refugees escape from fascist Europe.
In the late 1910s Bryher struck up a friendship with Havelock Ellis—he
accompanied her and H.D. on a trip to Greece in 1920. She was also friendly
with two of the women who were to play a central role in British psychoa-
nalysis—Mary Chadwick and Barbara Low. She was much closer, however,
to Hanns Sachs, whom she met in Berlin in the late 1920s, and who ana-
lyzed her for a number of years. (She was living for a good part of the year
in Switzerland at this time.) In the early 1930s she vicariously experienced
H.D.’s analysis with Freud. From the 1930s onward there was close friend-
ship with Melanie Klein’s estranged daughter and son-in-law, Melitta and
Walter Schmideberg (“the Bears”). She took care of Walter Schmideberg in
Switzerland when he was ill and dependent—the nature of their relationship
was obscure even to their closest friends.
In the early 1920s Bryher wrote and published two autobiographical
novels— Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923). These novels of formation
delineate a growing divide between the norms of femininity and the boy
that Nancy (Bryher’s fictional alter ego) feels herself to be. Childhood repre-
sented the possible assumption of masculinity, while the trauma of the girls’
school to which the female protagonist is sent as a teenager is that of a vio-
lent sexing against her own sense of gender identity. Bryher’s narrative can
thus be mapped on to Freud’s account of gender identity as fundamentally
undifferentiated until the girl reaches puberty and is channeled into femi-
nine identifications.
“Oh to be a boy and have the world,” Bryher writes in Development.35
Boyhood becomes identified with adventure—in particular that of putting
to sea (we recall Bryher’s father’s shipping lines): “[T]he door was locked; she
could only wait at the window, desolate with lost adventure, desolate with
a boyishness that might never put to sea.”36 Solace comes only with litera-
ture—with vers libre, and with the Elizabethans, who give her images of girls
who disguise themselves in boys’ clothing, paramount among them Bellario.
Bryher’s first published article was on the girl page in Elizabethan literature.
Development was widely reviewed and for the most part well received. Bryher
had sent a manuscript version to Havelock Ellis, whom she had approached
for his views on cross-dressing and on the “colour hearing” (the attachment
of particular colors to letters or phonemes) she had always experienced. As
she wrote to H.D. in March 1919 of this visit:
Then he [Ellis] brought out tea and we plunged into “colour-hearing” and
“cross-dressing.” I should fill pages if I were to write all this down, so I shall
have to wait and tell you all about it. Then we got on to the question of
whether I was a boy sort of escaped into the wrong body and he says it is a
disputed subject but quite possible and showed me a book about it. He said
I should find it perhaps too difficult to read as it was very scientific. We
agreed it was most unfair for it to happen but apparently I am quite justi-
fied in pleading I ought to be a boy,—I am just a girl by accident.37
At one level this model of the “boy sort of escaped into the wrong body”
represents turn-of-the-century sexological theories of homosexuality,
which psychoanalysis was largely to displace. At another level we can see
how Bryher’s gender-perceptions map onto recent theorizations of early
twentieth-century lesbianism as transsexualism, as in Jay Prosser’s read-
ing of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.38 As Joanne Winning notes,
Bryher was from 1929 onward collecting articles and reports on sex-change
operations and stories of individuals who crossed gender identities, mate-
rial she did not supplement with articles on homosexuality until 1949.39 In
a letter of 1937, written to the analyst Walter Schmideberg, Bryher noted
with disappointment that “[n]o research has been made in p.a. with regard
to the girl who is really a boy. Freud made one study [Psychogenesis of a
Case of Homosexuality in a Woman], and there are a few occasional refer-
ences, that is all . . . Turtle [Hanns Sachs] knows much but never writes about
it.”40 Throughout her life, Bryher avidly collected books that spoke to the
116 Laura Marcus
fantasy of gender transformation and/or to images of boyhood, including

Elizabethan literature and Edwardian boys’ adventure stories. In the early
1930s she met and subsequently pursued with a passion the German stage
and screen actress Elizabeth Bergner, who had made her reputation playing
Joan of Arc in the 1920s and continued to star in cross-dressed roles. When
Bryher came to write historical novels after the war, the boy-player and the
boy-adventurer were their heroes.
Turning now to Bryher’s experiences of Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s,
we find little reference in letters to Berlin’s notorious sexual freedoms, by con-
trast with, for example, the lesbian psychologist Charlotte Wolff’s accounts
(in her autobiography Hindsight [1980]) of visiting Berlin’s numerous lesbian
and cross-dressing clubs and her interest in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für
Sexualwissenschaften (Institute for Sexual Sciences). (Charlotte Wolff published
a biography of Hirschfeld titled Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in
Sexology in 1986.) There was, nonetheless, a sexual charge to Bryher’s, H.D.’s,
and Macpherson’s responses to Berlin’s modernity, which perhaps helped to
sustain their ménage, for a time at least. Bryher’s preoccupations and pas-
sions during Berlin’s Weimar years also became a mirror-image of its cultural
face, as she dashed between film, psychoanalysis, and the Berlin Zoo, and
appointed a Berlin architect—Henselmann—to build a Bauhaus dwelling in
Switzerland, complete with a film studio that was never actually used. She
called it “Kenwin,” a marriage of a kind between Kenneth (Macpherson) and
herself (Winifred).
Bryher was later to write of this period:
I find myself unable to describe the atmosphere of that time. It was violent
and strange and I felt more drawn into it than I had been into the literary
world of Paris. Chance or destiny who knew, some people fitted into mov-
ies like a piece into a puzzle, they soared to the top for a few days or weeks,
suddenly to make a fresh start, perhaps never to be heard of again. Work of
any kind was hard to get, people in the early Thirties were literally starv-
ing. Yet because a camera caught not so much an expression as a thought
beneath as if for the first time a lens could record an emotion or thought,
we all seemed to be living in a world above ourselves, really something that
was utterly new with no reflexions of other ages or thoughts about it.
It was also linked for me with psycho-analysis. I felt that the analysis of
that period had been invented just for my own pleasure, I loved it. I had
asked “why” ever since I could remember and now I was getting answers to
my “why” for the first time. It stirred my sense of history and eventually, I
was allowed to attend the formal meetings, a carrot being tendered to me
in the hope that I would forget the outside world and present myself as a
candidate for training. I am sorry for the world today, now it has become
a medical preserve and everything is standardized but in those days it was
experimental [ . . . ] I used to go to Dr Sachs, he lived in the Mommsenstrasse
then, for my hour and in time was promoted to be allowed to go to the
evening lectures, on theory and with examples.41
Bryher, in analysis with Sachs in Berlin, was taking seriously the idea of a
training analysis, though she expressed her boredom at listening to lectures
at the Berlin Institute: “I was bored most of the time. Passive again—don’t
want to listen to other people on P.A. but want to get on the job myself!”
By 1931, meanwhile, both H.D. and Macpherson were in analysis with
Mary Chadwick in London—H.D., apparently, to recover from the shock of
Macpherson’s turning away from her and into homosexual relationships;
Macpherson as, it would appear, the price he had to pay for Bryher’s contin-
ued financial support.
Psychoanalysis—Bryher’s own, and that of the others for whom she was
paying—became one way of orchestrating relationships at a new kind of
level. Bryher wrote to H.D. (April 25, 1931):
I am so sorry that you are having an unsettled time with the analysis. It
must be analogous to having it happen all over again. I had a most friendly
letter from Rvr. [Macpherson]. The most friendly since arrival! I hope he is
being thoroughly vicious about me with Chaddie [Chadwick] because the
things I dream about him—! Even the Turtle [Sachs] chuckles.
Psychoanalysis—defined, we recall, by John Forrester through “the logic

of the ménage”—became a last-ditch attempt to preserve the logic of their
ménage. In a letter to Bryher (June 2, 1931), H.D. reported a furious argument
with Macpherson: “Just remember: all that I write in this confidential vein
about K. is for you only, and the Herr Doctor. [I] told him what I thought was
due him in the way of loyalty to our situation as THREE people, apart from
ANY relationship between self and him, as lovers.”
Although Bryher warned against “leaking” too much from psychoanalysis,
she also wrote quite openly in her letters to H.D. about her analytic sessions.
Sexual identity was, unsurprisingly, the central question. On June 8, 1931,
she wrote:
The deeper I go the more male I get; it’s queer. It seems to me funny one
decides one’s whole life by the time one is two. Or more or less so . . . My
analysis sticks because almost as far back as memory I am “male” but there
must have been one point Turtle [Sachs] says, where I decided to be “male.”
And till we find out we are stuck. It might come to-day and it might be
months. And then afterwards only can I be prodded towards some definite
attitude. (N.d.)
“I have come to the bones as it were avec Turtle,” she wrote in her next
letter:
There was apparently never question of compromise—there is with

most—I said I wanted codpiece [penis] or nothing always in the uncon-
scious and we have worked back this layer right to three. The thing that
won’t come up is what happened before three to make this so definite.
118 Laura Marcus
Because compromise is apparently lacking all the way through. Turtle

says it might come up tomorrow and it might not come up for years and
until the situation is remembered remedial measures can’t be applied. It
all hinges on that one thing. It is a nuisance though as I do want to get
through and experiment on other people.
(She wrote later to H.D. [March 16, 1933], who was by then being analyzed by
Freud in Vienna: “I am glad I am a ‘male’ in your unconscious.”)
Bryher’s considerable wealth certainly seems to have played a part in
Sachs’s ambitions for her to become a psychoanalyst. In the 1930s she started
up a fund for training analysts in Vienna, gave money to the Verlag—Freud’s
publishing house for psychoanalytic works—and was gleeful about the dis-
sension she caused between psychoanalytic groups in Vienna and London.
Letters from 1934, after Sachs had left Berlin for Boston, show her at the
Psychoanalytic Congress, which was held in Lucerne that year. In a letter to
H.D. dated August 28, she wrote:
“Jones has declared war on me. The Jones-Klein group are as mad as they
can be that the dollars have gone to Sachs-Anna. I licked lips and giggled.”
“I rather love it though,” she added in a further letter, “not because of
scientific interests . . . but because of the dirt.”[ “Dirt” was Bryher’s habitual
term for “gossip,” and it sustained her analysis with Sachs]: “And the dirt!
He dished it up so carefully in morsels, watching the effect on us . . . the
choice bits I must keep till we see you but I can assure you it was Berlin at
its most lurid.”
Bryher’s letters from this period, which frequently pit “the moralists” in psy-
choanalytic circles against “the strict Freudians,” also suggest a division along
the lines of sexual politics. In Berlin, it was the homosexual and analytical
communities that were simultaneously put under threat and then destroyed.
For Bryher, it was the “English psychoanalysts” (many of them women), by
contrast with those in Berlin, who represented moralism and a disapproval
of homosexuality.
“I went to see Dorothy T. [Townsend] yesterday—she has been continu-

ously ill since Christmas and asked me why I didn’t have a little one as the
aim of all analysis for women was to have a little one, and there was noth-
ing so dreadful as lesbianism. Although the brother of Virginia Woolff (sic)
is an analyst and has married—it is said—a Swede who likes girls. This is
most discouraging from Dorothy but it seems part of the technique here
for Stephen [Guest?] was always on about it.”
“I like Chaddie, love her,” H.D. wrote to Bryher during her analysis with
Mary Chadwick, “but, rock-bottom she is ENGLISH . . . perhaps that is the
worst and the best to say of anyone” (H.D. to Bryher, June 2, 1931). At the end
of 1931, H.D. was in analysis with Sachs in Berlin, contrasting him favorably
with Mary Chadwick: “He is terribly kind and helpful, just the person for
me, as he ties it all up into a dramatic whole, while with poor Chaddie a
lot of subterranean ‘morality’ somehow had to creep in” (H.D. to Bryher,
December 3, 1931). And, on Christmas Day, 1931, in Vienna with Sachs: “I
have done with Tee what I did not do with Chaddie. I have evidently shunted
over the repressed father-complex to him.” In 1932, she was reading inten-
sively in psychoanalytic journals and books and mentioning “talk of my pos-
sibly going to Freud himself in Vienna.”
In the spring of 1933, as Close Up entered its final year, H.D. traveled to
Vienna for psychoanalysis with Freud, bearing Sachs’s recommendation.42
There were in fact two separate periods of analysis with Freud—from March
to June 1933 and from October to December 1934. What had led her there,
H.D. wrote, was the feeling that her creativity was blocked and that “I wanted
to free myself of repetitive thoughts and experiences”—always linked for her
with World War I and with her “war-phobia.”43 She referred to herself as a
“student” of Freud and not a patient, though the question of the analysis as a
training analysis seems not to have been pursued.
Tribute to Freud encompasses two separate works. The first of these, ”Writing
on the Wall,” was written in London in the autumn of 1944, without recourse,
H.D. alleged, to the notebooks that she had kept in Vienna in the spring of
1933. It was written as a construction or reconstruction, echoing the terms of
Freud’s 1937 essay “Constructions in Analysis,” in which (in ways that have
a particular bearing on the analysis with H.D.) he drew an extended analogy
between the work of the archaeologist and the analyst. “Writing on the Wall”
appeared in the journal Life and Letters To-Day in 1945–46. The second piece,
“Advent” (which H.D. referred to in a note as a continuation of “Writing on
the Wall” or as its prelude) was taken directly, H.D. wrote, from the notebooks
of 1933 (which were subsequently lost or destroyed), but not assembled until
December 1948. The issue of the Vienna notebooks was a loaded one, because
Freud seems to have asked her neither to prepare for nor to take notes on the
analytic sessions: “He does not, apparently, want me to take notes, but I must
do that.”44 She did in fact abandon the notebook during the first period of
analysis, but continued to write in some detail to Bryher about her sessions
with Freud. For Bryher, in particular, the question of historical record was
always central, and she kept and filed correspondence and other personal
documents with immense care and with regard to their significance as his-
torical and auto/biographical source materials.
H.D.’s letters of this period reveal dimensions of the analysis not explored
in the two memoirs, including a set of highly complicated negotiations at
the time of the birth of Freud’s beloved chow Yofi’s puppies, one or both of
which Freud wished to give to the Bryher household, and which also became
caught up in the analytic transference: “I had horrible dreams last night, I
suppose the puppy equates death, impregnation and so on” (H.D. to Bryher,
April 27, 1933). At this time, H.D. was also sending Bryher detailed reports
of her dreams, and in particular one that Freud had told her “represents
the whole of my life in a sequence of detached yet continuous incidents”
120 Laura Marcus
(April 28, 1933). For H.D., the dream’s value lay in its “new combinations,
all founded on the most trivial incident yet with a universal or astrological
symbolism.” Her astrology, she suggested, redeemed the “star-values” of her
father, an astronomer who measured the stars with, as she puts it, “a cold
hermit logic and detachment,” and the association of whom with Freud (“the
Professor”) was central to the analysis.
The crisis engendered by Freud’s proposed gift of the puppy, or puppies,
also became imbricated with H.D.’s curious account of his “new” theory of
female sexuality, and her perception that she and Bryher must not disrupt the
working out of his ideas, to which they were instrumental:
Papa [Freud] has a complete new theory but he says he dare not write it
because he does not want to make enemies of women. Apparently, we
have all stirred him up frightfully. His idea is that all women are deeply
rooted in penis-envy, not only the bi-sexual or homo-sexual woman. The
advanced or intellectual woman is [more] frank about it. That is all. But the
whole cult and development of normal-womanhood is based on the same
fact; the envy of the woman for the penis. Now this strikes me as being a
clue to everything. The reason women are FAITHFUL, when men are not,
the reason a Dorothy R. [Richardson] or a Cole will stick like grim-death
to some freak like Alan or Gerald, the reason mama or my mother went
insane at the oddest things, the reason for this, the reason for that. I was
awake all last night and up this morning just after 7 . . . as this seemed to
convince me more than anything. What got me, was his saying that the
homo woman is simply frank and truthful but that the whole of domestic
womanhood is exactly the same, but has built up its cult on deception.
Well, he did not say deception. He just flung out the idea. I screamed at
him, “but the supreme compliment to WOMAN would be to trust women
with this great secret.” I said Br, the princess [Marie Bonaparte] and myself
would appreciate it, and keep it going. Or something like that. Anyhow,
do you see what I mean??? We have evidently done some fish-tail stirring,
and if papa bursts out like the Phoenix with his greatest contribution
NOW, I feel you and I will be in some way, responsible. This is a thing,
for instance, that Chaddie [Mary Chadwick] fought against, and tried to
make out that the monthly is interesting and that men envy women.
Well, men do. But the whole thing must be “built on a rock” anyhow, and
I feel the S.F. is that rock, and that perhaps you and I (as I did say half in
joke) ARE to be instrumental in some way in feeding the light. (H.D. to
Bryher, May 3, 1933)
It is of course surprising to find H.D. proclaiming “penis-envy” as a new

discovery in the 1930s, when Freud had in fact first discussed it in the 1908
essay “On the Sexual Theories of Children” and allied it to his theory of
the little girl’s “castration complex” in “On Narcissism” (1914). The context
for her letter was almost certainly the reformulation of theories of female
sexuality, and of female homosexuality, by analysts such as Karen Horney,
Helene Deutsch, and Ernest Jones in the late 1920s, to which Freud was
responding in his writings on female sexuality in the early 1930s, including
the 1932/33 essay “On Femininity.” Here Freud asserted that “[o]ne cannot
very well doubt the importance of envy for the penis”: “The wish to get
the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the
motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reason-
ably expect from analysis—a capacity, for instance, to carry on an intellec-
tual profession—may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of
this repressed wish.”45
In his 1927 essay on “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” Jones had
argued against the notion of “penis-envy” as a stage in the development of het-
erosexual women (and for a concept of “aphanisis,” a fear of the extinction of
the capacity for sexual enjoyment common to boys and girls). He thus reserved
“penis-envy,” which he had discredited as an explanation of feminine develop-
ment, as an explanation of the etiology of homosexual women.46 H.D.’s procla-
mation might in part be seen as an attempt, from within the terms offered to
her by Freudian theory, to refuse Jones’s way of differentiating between hetero-
sexual and homosexual women. She suggests, indeed, that homosexual women
are the measure of women tout court, acknowledging what the others deny. At
the same time, she seems to have resisted the concept of womb-envy developed
by Helene Deutsch and others, linked as it was to representations of mother-
hood as definitional of femininity. Her eccentric, or anachronistic, “discovery”
might thus be understood as an attempt to fight back against “the moralists.”
It is striking that of the British women analysts working at this time, it was
Ella Freeman Sharpe (with her absorption in questions of art and aesthetics) to
whose work H.D. was most drawn.
The debates and differences within psychoanalytic theories and techniques
to which H.D. alluded in her letters to Bryher do not appear in any very direct
way in “Writing on the Wall” or “Advent” (both works subsequently pub-
lished as Tribute to Freud ), although there are points at which she hints at
discomfort with his views on femininity and female sexuality, an “argument”
between them made more explicit in her poem “The Master.”47 In “Advent,”
she writes (following a description of a dream in which she had used “my little
bottle of smelling-salts” to salt her typewriter, her interpretation of which is
that she would come to “salt my savorless writing with the salt of the earth,
Sigmund Freud’s least utterance”) of the annoyance she had experienced with
“the Professor in one of his volumes”: “He said, as I remember, that women
did not creatively amount to anything or amount to much, unless they had a
male counterpart or a male companion from which they drew their inspira-
tion. Perhaps he is right and my dream of ‘salting’ my typewriter with the
tell-tale transference symbol is further proof of his infallibility.”48 The dream
thus confirmed for her, in the terms of her letter to Bryher, “SF” as the “rock”:
disagreement, “annoyance,” become merely superficial.
“Writing on the Wall” moves backward and forward in actual time, recount-
ing, for example, H.D.’s last meeting with Freud in London, soon before his
death in 1939, as well as in the time of memories and dreams. “Length,
122 Laura Marcus
breadth, thickness, the shape, the scent, the feel of things,” H.D. wrote. “The
actuality of the present, its bearing on the past, their bearing on the future’.
Past, present, future, these three—but there is another time-element, popu-
larly called the fourth dimensional.”49 I have mentioned the significance of
time—the hour—and space—the space of the room—for the analysand. The
“Writing on the Wall” returns again and again to the space of Freud’s consult-
ing rooms. His collection of Classical, Egyptian, and Indian antiquities was of
the greatest significance to H.D., and indeed the statuettes, rings, and coins
were the coinage, the common currency of the analysis. Freud, she wrote to
Kenneth Macpherson, “dashes in and out of his rooms to find me some lit-
tle god or other that has happened in to the conversation” (March 15, 1933).
“Some words ‘to greet the return of the Gods’” (other people read: Goods),
Freud wrote to H.D. after she had sent him gardenias and an unsigned card—
“to greet the return of the Gods”—to welcome him and his collection to
London in the autumn of 1938.50 Gods or goods—Freud’s response appears
to refer to her argument, perhaps never fully voiced, with what she saw as his
materialism and rationalism. Religion, myth, and psychoanalysis were inex-
tricably intertwined for H.D.:
The doll is the dream or the symbol of this particular child, as these vari-
ous Ra, Nut, Hathor, Isis, and Ka figures that are dimly apprehended on
their shelves or on the Professor’s table in the other room are the dream or
the symbol of the dream of other aspiring and adoring souls. The child-
hood of the individual is the childhood of the race, we have noted, the
Professor [Freud] has written somewhere.51
“We touched lightly on some of the more abstruse transcendental prob-

lems, it is true,” H.D. writes,
but we related them to the familiar family-complex. Tendencies of thought

and imagination, however, were not cut away, were not pruned even. My
imagination wandered at will; my dreams were revealing, and many of
them drew on classical and Biblical symbolism. Thoughts were things, to
be collected, collated, analyzed, shelved, or resolved. Fragmentary ideas,
apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or
stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were
sometimes skilfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and
iridescent glass bowls and vases that gleamed in the dusk from the shelves
of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up on the couch in
the room in Berggasse 19, Wien XIX. The dead were living in so far as they
lived in memory or were recalled in dream.52
The image of analytic discourse—free association and dream-interpreta-

tion—as the piecing together of the precious fragments of a bowl or vase—of
something that holds or contains—runs throughout the text, and again
recalls the terms of Freud’s essay “Constructions in Analysis.” At other times
it transmutes into the image of the mind as a vessel seemingly whole, but
precariously close to shattering:
There are dreams or sequences of dreams that follow a line like a graph on a
map or show a jagged triangular pattern, like a crack on a bowl that shows
the bowl or vase may at any moment fall in pieces; we all know that almost
invisible thread-line on the cherished glass butter-dish that predicts it will
“come apart in me ‘ands” sooner or later—sooner, more likely.53
Here the image of the bowl (of the unconscious) has become homely,
domestic—an aspect of the mystery that resides in the everyday. “I was here
because I must not be broken,” H.D. wrote, after describing the shock she
experienced when Freud suddenly burst out, beating with his fist on the ana-
lytic couch—“The trouble is—I am an old man—you do not think it worth your
while to love me”54 —concerned that Freud might feel that she needed to be
broken in order to be remade. “Did he think,” she asks, “it was easy to leave
friendly, comfortable surroundings and come to a strange city, to beard him,
himself, the dragon, in his very den?”55 She refers, too, to “women broken
by wars,” as she felt herself to have been broken by World War I, and as she
would be broken by World War II. There was thus no obvious question of a
“cure” by the analysis, though she was able to write again.
For H.D., remembered scenes, recalled in the analytic session, “are like
transparencies, set before candles in a dark room,” and the network of memo-
ries builds up to become a surface, onto which “there fell inevitably a shadow,
a writing-on-the-wall, a curve like a reversed, unfinished S and a dot beneath
it, a question mark, the shadow of a question—is this it?”56 Throughout
Tribute to Freud we are led around (as in a cinematic panning-shot) the space
of Freud’s consulting room in Vienna, following the line of its walls, the
fourth of which is a wall that is not a wall, its folding doors opening onto
a connecting room, the “room beyond,” which “may appear very dark or
there may be broken light and shadow.”57 She links this “fourth wall,” and
the room beyond, which contains Freud’s books and antiquities, both to her
father’s study and to the “fourth dimension,” the dimension that for Sergei
Eisenstein, writing in Close Up, was the dimension of the cinema. It is the
“fourth wall” and the “room beyond” that both H.D. and Freud face or look
toward, as she lies on the couch with Freud seated in the corner behind her,
his cigar smoke rising in the air.
In her 2009 study of archaeology and modernism, Knossos and the Prophets
of Modernism, Cathy Gere gives a compelling account of the significance for
modernist writers and thinkers of the archaeologist Arthur Evans’s discoveries
(and reconstructions) of the world of ancient Crete, which he (and a number
of his contemporaries and followers) identified as a matriarchal society.58
Gere discusses this as the context for Freud’s account, in the 1931 essay on
“Female Sexuality,” of the “early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls,” which, in Freud’s
words, “comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the
Minoan-Mycenean civilization of Greece.”59 In the essay, Freud writes, in terms
124 Laura Marcus
close to the archaeological analogies of “Constructions in Analysis,” of the

difficulty of grasping in analysis “the sphere of this first attachment to the
mother . . . so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—
that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.” It may
be, however, he suggests, that women analysts (he instances Jeanne Lampl-de
Groot and Helene Deutsch) “have been able to perceive these facts more easily
and clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their treat-
ment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute.”60 The analysis with
H.D, coming two years after this essay, and in the same year as Freud’s essay
on “Femininity,” appears to have been imbricated in the terms both of Freud’s
“discovery” and of the archaeological topoi through which he conceptual-
ized it. H.D. refers directly, in “Advent,” to discussion with Freud of Sir Arthur
Evans and his work, of “the Crete mother-goddess,” and of her mother-fixation,
which the analysis revealed.
As Gere writes: “Psychoanalysis and archaeology shared the same back-
ward chronology.”61 She finds this same structure in H.D.’s accounts of her
analysis, suggesting that “Advent,” in particular, should be understood not
merely as a construction or reconstruction, but as a fake or forgery, akin to
those that dominated archaeological “finds” and the narratives (in which
“myth” masquerades as “history”), which they generated. She argues that
H.D. deliberately destroyed the 1933 notebook on which “Advent” is said to
draw in order to conceal the fact that it showed so little engagement with the
increasingly desperate political and historical situation in the Vienna of these
years. “Advent,” Gere suggests, writes into its retrospective account (which
masquerades as a document of the times) a “constant pre-vision of disaster,”
in H.D.’s words.62 Through this strategy H.D. constructs herself in retrospect,
Gere argues, as a prophetess of the catastrophe to come.
“Already in Vienna,” H.D. wrote in “Writing on the Wall,” “the shadows
were lengthening or the tide was rising.”63 She wrote of picking up confetti-like
tokens outside her hotel, on which were written “mottoes”: “Hitler gives
bread,” “Hitler gives work,” of swastikas chalked on the Berggasse pavement,
and of rifles stacked at street corners. In “Advent,” she wrote directly about
the ways in which she felt silenced in her analytic sessions in this context.
She recalls a disturbing childhood memory, of her brothers putting salt on a
caterpillar, which “writhes, huge like an object seen under a microscope, or
looming up it is a later film-abstraction”: “No, how can I talk about the cruci-
fied Worm? I have been leafing over papers in the café, there are fresh atroc-
ity stories. I cannot talk about the thing that actually concerns me, I cannot
talk to Sigmund Freud in Vienna, 1933, about Jewish atrocities in Berlin.”64
For Gere, it is claims such as these through which, more than a decade later,
H.D. composed her retrospective account of analysis with Freud in the early
1930s, layering them over an original absence.
Gere’s level-headed account of H.D.’s mysticism provides, in many ways, a
refreshing contrast to the overwrought prose that characterizes a good deal
of the critical work on this writer. The connections she draws between mod-
ern archaeology and modernist culture are expert and convincing. Yet I am
not fully persuaded by her own constructions in the case of H.D.’s memoirs
of this time. H.D. habitually destroyed drafts and manuscripts once a fair or
published version came into being: there is no reason to suppose that the
destruction (if that is what it was) of the Vienna notebooks was a particularly
charged act of suppression. The extensive letters written and received by H.D.
at this time are strongly engaged with the political realities on the streets, and
H.D. explicitly comments in her letters on her unusual absorption in the daily
newspapers; the New York Times, one of the papers she read regularly, had par-
ticularly extensive coverage of the situation in Germany and Austria at this
time. It is certainly true that she wrote to Bryher at the time of her analysis
that she hated wasting her psychoanalytic hour on politics, but this was a
view with which Freud would almost certainly have concurred. In April 1933
Freud was, indeed, writing to Ernest Jones that ‘[d]espite all the newspaper
reports of mobs, demonstrations, etc., Vienna is calm, life undisturbed. We
can expect with certainty that the Hitler movement will spread to Austria, is
indeed already here, but it is very unlikely that it will present a similar danger
as in Germany . . . In such a way we lull ourselves into—relative—security.”65
More interesting then, than any imputation of “faking” or “forgery,” might
be a fuller consideration of the ways in which relationships among “inner”
and “outer” realities, psychoanalysis and politics, were playing themselves out
in the Europe of the 1930s. Freud was writing extensively, in this period, on
war, aggression, and anti-Semitism: anxiety, ambivalence, and the origins of
love and hate were at the heart of psychoanalytic theories more generally in
the first part of a century which was devastated by two world wars. The experi-
ences of analysands abroad at this charged time make their own, very particu-
lar, contribution to an understanding of the ways in which psyche and polis
intersect, as well as to the ways in which we conceptualize this very divide.
Our understanding of psychoanalysis as an international movement would be
illuminated and enlarged by further exploration of the encounters and experi-
ences of those many analysands and analysts who undertook foreign travel in
a volatile Europe, in the service of the journey into the interior.
Notes
1. See, e.g., essays in the volume Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes, eds.
Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1988).
2. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955),
40–41.
3. Ibid., 31–32. Eitingon, Jones writes, then a medical student in Zurich, came to Vienna
in January 1907 to consult Freud over a severe case he was interested in: “He passed
three or four evenings with Freud and they were spent on personal analytic work dur-
ing long walks in the city. Such was the first training analysis!”
4. Ibid., 98.
5. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 78.
6. See the anniversary volume, Zehn Jahre Berliner Psychanalytisches Institut (Polyklinik
und Lehranstalt) 1920–1930 (Vienna, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930;
reprinted by Anton Hain KG, Meisenheim, 1970).
126 Laura Marcus
7. Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
139. For discussion of the clinic, see also Sally Alexander, “Psychoanalysis in Britain in
the Early Twentieth Century: An Introductory Note,” in History Workshop Journal, issue
45 (1998), 135–143.
8. Raitt, May Sinclair, 139.
9. Paul Roazen, Oedipus in Britain: Edward Glover and the Struggle over Klein (NY: Other Press,
2000), 33.
10. In Ella Freeman Sharpe, Collected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950), 136.
11. H.D., Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), 3. Berggasse is in fact in the
ninth district of Vienna, not the nineteenth. At that period, Freud sometimes saw
patients – for example, the American Joseph Wortis – in a house in Döbling, in the nine-
teenth district; this may account for H.D’s confusion. My thanks to Ritchie Robertson
for this suggestion.
12. Susan Stanford Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and their Circle (New York:
New Directions Publishing, 2002) 177.
13. Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XII (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 136.
14. John Forrester, “Psychoanalysis: Gossip, Telepathy and/or Science,” in The Seductions of
Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
243–259.
15. Ibid., 253.
16. Ibid., 258.
17. Ibid., 224.
18. Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–1925, eds. Perry Meisel and
Walter Kendrick (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
19. Ibid., 274.
20. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew
Paskauskas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 431.
21. Bloomsbury/Freud, 125.
22. Ibid., 137.
23. Ibid., 199.
24. Ibid., 114.
25. Ibid., 137.
26. Ibid., 271–272.
27. For detailed histories of the Cambridge psychoanalytic networks, see the work by Laura
Cameron and John Forrester, “‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and Freud,”
History Workshop Journal, issue 48 (1999), 65–100; “Tansley’s Psychoanalytic Network:
An Episode out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England,” Psychoanalysis and
History 2(2) (2000), 189–256. See also John Forrester, “Freud in Cambridge,” Critical
Quarterly 46(2), (2004) 1–26 ; “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and
London—Myers, Jones and MacCurdy,” Psychoanalysis and History 10.1 (2008), 37–94.
28. Bloomsbury/Freud, 83.
29. Ibid., 231.
30. Ibid., 145.
31. Ibid., 237.
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid., 201.
34. See Barbara Caine, “The Stracheys and Psychoanalysis,” History Workshop Journal
issue 45 (1998), 145–169.
35. Bryher, Development, in Joanne Winning, ed., Bryher: Two Novels (Madison, WI:
Wisconsin University Press, 2000), 136.
36. Ibid., 154.
37. Bryher, Letter to H.D., March 20, 1919. The letters of Bryher and H.D. are held in the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Many of the letters from
the period I am considering have also been published in Stanford Friedman, Analyzing
Freud.
38. Jay Prosser, “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: The
Transsexual Emerging from The Well,” in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, eds., Palatable
Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), 129–144.
39. Introduction to Bryher: Two Novels, xxx.
40. Quoted Maggie Magee and Diane C. Miller, Lesbian Lives: Psychoanalytic Narratives Old
and New (New York: Analytic Press, 1996), 26.
41. Bryher, “Berlin” (two-page typescript). Beinecke Library, Bryher papers, Box 72, Folder
2855.
42. See Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, eds. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura
Marcus (London: Continuum, 1998); and Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about
Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
43. H.D., Tribute to Freud, 13.
44. Ibid., 165.
45. Freud, “On Femininity,” Standard Edition, vol. XXII, 125.
46. Ernest Jones, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 8 (1927), 459–472.
47. See Friedman, Analyzing Freud, 227–228.
49. Ibid., 23.
50. Ibid., 11.
51. Ibid., 38.
52. Ibid., 13–14.
53. Ibid., 93
54. Ibid., 16
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 30.
57. Ibid., 23.
58. Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2009).
59. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” in Standard Edition, vol. XX1, 226.
60. Ibid., 227.
61. Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, 155.
62. H.D., Tribute to Freud, 139; Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, 192.
64. Ibid., 135.
65. R. Andrew Paskausas, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones
1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1993) 716.
6
Beyond Containing: World War I and
the Psychoanalytic Theories of
Wilfred Bion
Michael Roper
After his demobilization in early 1919, and while waiting to begin a his-
tory degree at Queen’s College, Oxford, Wilfred Bion wrote a memoir of his
experiences as a tank commander during 1917–18. Called “Diary, France,”
it was dedicated to his parents “[i]n place of letters I should have written.”1
Between 1958 and his death in 1979—during which Bion acquired an inter-
national reputation as a post-Kleinian clinician and theorist—he wrote a fur-
ther three memoirs and other recollections of the war. These were published
posthumously by his wife Francesca during the decade and a half after Bion’s
death.
This chapter considers Bion’s writings about World War I, from the return-
ing soldier of 1919 to the psychoanalyst in his seventies. It asks how and
why his memories of the war shifted over time, and explores the connections
between his experiences in the war and his psychoanalytic interests; connec-
tions that were increasingly articulated by Bion himself from his early sixties.
Bion was not unusual in being preoccupied with the war in his later life: the
1960s and 1970s saw a substantial increase in the numbers of published and
unpublished World War I memoirs.2 The rise of social history and increasing
public interest in the personal testimonies of ordinary soldiers rather than
military leaders contributed to this trend, as did the ageing and increased
leisure of the veterans themselves, who in retirement were often drawn to
remember the war.3
At the same time, individual factors affected the manner and timing of
Bion’s remembering, and I will consider two here. Bion’s war and his psy-
choanalytic interests were closely linked. They were linked chronologically,
his memoir writing from the late 1950s overlapping with his clinical work
on extreme emotional disturbances. This work shared much with the ideas
129
130 Michael Roper
of British contemporaries such as Winnicott and Bowlby in putting early

domestic relationships, and the maternal relation, at the center, but it also
bore traces of Bion’s war.4 If on the one hand, like many returned soldiers, he
struggled after the war to establish himself in his personal and professional
life (he was well into his forties when he began to train as a psychoanalyst,
and in his mid-fifties when he remarried and began to publish the essays on
psychosis that would bring him international renown5), on the other, war
shaped his psychoanalytic sensibilities. Indeed, Mary Jacobus goes so far as to
claim that his wartime traumas “offered a template for the psychotic states he
later described in his analytic patients.”6 Equally, however, Bion’s descriptions
of psychotic states in the 1950s would themselves become the templates from
which he reflected on the war and rendered his war emotional experiences
into words. His war memories were, through the 1960s and 1970s, reworked
through a psychoanalytic idiom.
Focusing on Bion’s ideas about the maternal relation, the first part of this
chapter traces the connections between Bion’s war and his clinical work,
from the outbreak of World War II, when the traumas of World War I were
still, arguably, exerting a powerful but not always conscious impact on his
thinking, to his late life, when the relations between the psychoanalyst’s “I”
and the veteran’s “I” had become an explicit object of his thought. Bion never
fully “recovered” from the war. He continued to have nightmares about it,
and as we shall see, he would return to the same incidents again and again in
his memoirs. At the same time, World War I helped form him as a psychoana-
lyst, and psychoanalysis helped him to subject his war to thought.
Psychoanalysis was not the only factor to influence Bion’s memoir-writing
from the 1950s. His personal circumstances—particularly his second mar-
riage in 1951 after the tragic death of his first wife in 1945—gave Bion more
domestic stability than he had experienced since leaving India for an English
preparatory school half a century earlier, at the age of eight. The recovery of
the ability to dream, which Bion often wrote about in his clinical capacity, was
not just a professional therapeutic ambition, but was facilitated by Bion’s per-
sonal relationships as a husband and father. A secure home life from the 1950s
on helped make it possible for him to turn his mind to the war. His domestic
situation, coupled with the therapeutic idiom of psychoanalysis, provided the
conditions of Bion’s reremembering of the war in later life. That remember-
ing was influenced by the common imperatives of ageing, the social history
of soldier memoirs, and the postwar “maternal turn” in psychoanalysis and
the welfare state, but equally by Bion’s particular intellectual and emotional
journey as a veteran, psychoanalyst, and husband.
Bion’s War
Bion was born in India in 1897 into an “empire family,” his father an engi-
neer. After leaving for England in 1905 (he did not see his mother for the
next three years) and attending Bishops Stortford College, a nonconformist
public school, he went into the Tank Corps at the age of 19. He was 20 years
Beyond Containing 131
old when he went into battle for the first time, in the disastrous attack of 3rd
Ypres in September 1917 when the advancing tanks—including Bion’s own—
became bogged and broke down in the mud of no man’s land.
Tank crews were not necessarily more prone to become casualties than
infantry, but tank warfare possessed its own particular terrors. Conditions
inside were extremely hot and cramped, as men were seated around the
engine. Sight of the battlefield was gleaned from tiny flaps, which often had
to be shut down as tanks advanced, leaving only the pounding of machine
gun fire on the tank’s armor to direct them. In the early models, shards of
the armor plating would flake off under fire, peppering the crew.7 The noise
of shell-fire would be largely drowned out by the sound of the engine during
an advance, but a stopped tank would quickly become a sitting target, leaving
the crew exposed to shells crashing around the iron carapace.8 The experi-
ence, wrote D. G. Browne in 1920, “always renders me virtually imbecile;
almost incapable of coherent thought or action.”9 In such a situation the tank
was vulnerable to a direct hit, which could ignite the fuel and engulf it in fire.
Interviewed at the age of 99, tank driver “Mac” Francis recalled that “there’s
nothing worse than a tank going on fire, I tell you. Hopeless, hopeless,” as the
crew were often “roasted alive.”10
Bion was in action again at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, and
throughout summer 1918. While guiding his company’s tanks into action at
the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 (Bion was by then a section commander),
one of them burst into flames, burning to death the entire crew, including
his ex-second in command and valued comrade Sergeant O’Toole.11 Two days
later he came upon a further five of his battalion’s tanks, all facing the enemy
“in a neat line,” but knocked out and “left there looking like burst toads—
the roofs lifted off, the sides bulging out.”12 Bion’s last action was at the
Fonsomme Line in October 1918. After helping to clear out a tank that had
been hit by a gas shell, he reports, “I got out of the tank and rather dream-
ily watched the crew rolling about outside—some coughing, some groaning
and one man lying almost still enough to be dead. I felt rather numbed and
couldn’t think properly.”13
Bion was barely in his majority when the war ended. The 1919 account of
his time in the Tank Corps was composed from memory but based on diaries
that he had lost. Its tone is spare and factual. Bion rarely reflects on his state
of mind, though the cumulative effect of his descriptions of battle is cer-
tainly disturbing to the reader. His opening paragraph hints at the memoir’s
function in communicating unprocessed fragments of his war experience.
He intends, Bion tells his parents, to “give you our feelings at the time I am
writing of.”14
Between 1919 and 1958 Bion appears not to have written about the war. In
1958, aged 60, he wrote an unfinished account of his experience at Amiens.
There was then a gap of a decade or so before, based in Los Angeles and then
in his seventies, Bion embarked on a further series of accounts, including a
1972 “Commentary” on the 1919 “Diary,” written as a dialogue between the
mature psychoanalyst and the young tank commander. By his own admission
132 Michael Roper
this was the first time in 53 years that Bion had reread the “Diary.”15 At around
the same time as the “Commentary,” he composed a full-length memoir of his
life up to 1919, published in 1982 as The Long Weekend 1897–1919.16 Narrated
in the first person, this takes a more conventional form as autobiography.
Roughly the first quarter of The Long Weekend narrates memories of India, his
parents and his ayah, the misery of life in an English boarding school, and
the sexual turmoil of adolescence, while the remaining three-quarters is con-
cerned with the war. Short evocations of his war experience also appear in All
My Sins Remembered (the unfinished sequel to The Long Weekend ) and Bion’s
novelistic trilogy, A Memoir of the Future, published between 1975 and 1981,
which like the 1972 “Commentary” takes the form of an internal dialogue
between Bion the psychoanalyst and other characters.
The 1919 “Diary,” Paulo Cesar Sandler notes, can be viewed as the raw mate-
rial or “preparatory notes” of the later memoirs.17 Certain events reappear,
albeit with minor variations, suggesting their salience as encrusted fragments
of emotional experience that Bion was still, half a century on from the war,
trying to process. As such these descriptions also suggest the significance
of the war for Bion’s thinking about the mental landscape of the psychotic
patient. They reveal something of the personal material that he brought to
bear in understanding his patients’ emotional states.
Bion’s Early Work and the Legacy of War
After completing his history degree at Oxford, Bion studied medicine at

University College Hospital London, where he first encountered psychoa-
nalysis and apparently used an army gratuity to pay for therapy.18 Despite
establishing a medical career, like many veterans Bion remained, according
to his biographer Gérard Bléandonu, somewhat alienated and unhappy.19 He
continued to suffer from nightmares of clinging to the banks of the flooded
Steenbeck River. The more he tried to dig his fingers and toes into the mud,
the further he slipped toward the “raging torrent.”20 He underwent training
as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic during the 1930s, and in 1937
he began an analysis with John Rickman. This was prematurely terminated
by the outbreak of World War II, after which Bion, working with Rickman,
undertook pioneering work as a military psychiatrist on group mentalities and
behavior.21 His “intense attachment” to Rickman during this time, Dimitris
Vonofakos and Bob Hinshelwood have recently remarked, helped Bion to lift
the shadow of war and liberate his creativity.22
It was the outbreak of World War II that brought Bion, then in his early
forties, into print for the first time, with an article on civilian morale. The
“rather dogmatic style” of this piece suggests that, facing the prospect of
a second war, Bion was still experiencing the aftermath of the first, but it
also suggests how his experience as a tank commander, dealing with anxi-
ety among soldiers, might have contributed to his later work on maternal
containing.23 Bion’s article focused on panic and the power of “infantile
emotions” to distract people from external danger.24 In the face of such
tendencies, Bion emphasized the need for leaders to foster “the individual’s
feeling for home”—particularly its “security-giving elements.” A good Air
Raid Precautions scheme, for example, could help the worker “feel the care
of a good parental image that feeds and clothes.”25 We see something of the
subaltern officer’s concern with the role of basic domestic care in morale:
in his 1919 “diary” Bion had noted the importance of warmth, food, and
rest to the soldier, though he now attributed their salience less to physical
than to psychological factors, such care being rooted in early attachments.26
Bion only makes one direct reference to his own military experience. The
performance of small tasks, he remarks, can help people gain confidence in
the face of attack: he himself remembered “the satisfying feeling that was
produced on one occasion during the last war, when the objective situation
appeared desperate and the enemy commenced an attack, by the simple act
of having to buckle on belt and equipment before standing to arms.”27 This
passage gives little hint of the extreme anxieties that Bion had experienced
before battle, anxieties about which he had written in his “Diary” of 1919
and would remember again 20 years later.28 Bion does not relate any other
personal memories but gives a telling glimpse of his familiarity with vio-
lence: “[T]he sight of blood on civilian clothes,” he reflects, is “liable to be
particularly unnerving.”29
Although Bion’s personal experience of war appears obliquely in this essay,
his military background was certainly apparent to the colleagues who worked
with him at the Northfield Hospital during World War II. This brought him
a certain amount of respect among civilian colleagues and the soldiers who
were his patients. Eric Trist thought he looked more like a general than a psy-
chiatrist in uniform, while Bion’s DSO and Legion d’honneur ribbons helped
convey an impression of “imposing military presence” to John Sutherland.30
His status as a veteran even gave Bion the confidence to challenge Freud. In
an essay of 1952, reviewing his work on groups and informed by his subse-
quent interest in Klein, he writes that Freud is mistaken to approximate group
behavior with neurotic responses and oedipal relationships; rather, they per-
tain to psychotic behavior.31 “Freud says that panic is best studied in mili-
tary groups. I experienced panic with troops in action on two occasions,” he
remarks, but these “do not appear in all respects to bear out Freud’s theories.”32
Bion invoked World War I infrequently in this phase of his career, but when he
did, it was principally as a leader dealing with the anxieties of other men, not
his own, and of groups rather than individuals. The references to his military
past gave Bion a means of establishing himself in his work with traumatized
soldiers, but did not reveal his own traumatic experiences of war.
After Bion began a training analysis with Melanie Klein in 1945, which lasted
for eight years, his interests became more explicitly psychoanalytic.33 He quali-
fied as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1950 and
began to work with individual patients, largely giving up his earlier work with
groups. Some see this “more inward psychological journey” as a striking dis-
juncture from the “outward social journey” of his group work in the 1940s.34
In response, it could be said that his military experience in World War I and
134 Michael Roper
his work on groups had revealed to Bion the significance of anxiety and psy-
chotic elements in group behavior, whose unconscious origins he would go on
to explore in his clinical work during the 1950s.35 His psychoanalytic concerns
were moving closer to home. It is this period, from the mid-1950s to Bion’s
death in 1979, during which Bion’s psychoanalytic creativity flourished and he
wrote prolifically about his war, that I shall focus on in the rest of the chapter.
Maternal Containing and the Memory of War
Bion’s concept of “reverie,” which first appeared in his essay of 1962, “A

Theory of Thinking,” reveals some of the linkages between his psychoan-
alytic thinking and the memory of war.36 Reverie for Bion referred to the
mother’s ability to be unconsciously attuned to the emotional state of the
baby. The calm attentiveness of the mother was not unlike what Freud called
the “free-floating” or “evenly suspended attention” of the analyst, whose
unconscious must remain open to the material coming from the patient. For
Bion, reverie was—as the name suggests—closely associated with dreaming.
When the mother was in a state of reverie, said Bion, she was able to sense the
infant’s distress, take it in, and process it.37 Reverie, then, was the quality of
attentiveness to the infant’s emotional state.
But Bion, dealing as he was with extremely disturbed patients, was more
concerned with failures in communication than in what he called the “well-
balanced mother.”38 When the mother could not be attentive, the baby was
forced to take back its projective identifications. It thus faced the double bur-
den of having to manage its own anxiety and of dealing with a mother who
could not tolerate its anxiety. What ensued was a state of meaninglessness. As
Bion puts it:
Normal development follows if the relationship between infant and breast

permits the infant to project a feeling, say, that it is dying into the mother
and to reintroject it after its sojourn in the breast has made it tolerable
to the infant psyche. If the projection is not accepted by the mother the
infant feels that its feeling that it is dying is stripped of such meaning as
it has. It therefore reintrojects, not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a
nameless dread.39
The most severe mental disturbances, Bion thought—such as psychotic

states—were the result of failures in mothering, as the infant whose anxi-
ety was constantly returned to it would not develop a normal capacity for
thought, but would instead internalize the mother’s incapacity to tolerate
and process its unconscious communications.
Something of the war’s impact on Bion is conveyed in the concepts of
“reverie” and “nameless dread.” Bion the tank commander had known well
enough the feeling of impending disaster and the sense of persecution and
meaninglessness that could ensue when anxieties could not be assuaged.
Such traits, Bion argued, were characteristic of the psychotic personality.
The schizophrenic, Bion would state in 1956, suffered an “unremitting dread

of imminent annihilation.”40 By focusing on some of the events that Bion
returned to in his memoirs from the 1950s, and tracing the shifts between
the “diary” of 1919 and the later accounts, it is possible to see how the threat
of actual annihilation in the war might have animated Bion’s theories of
psychic disintegration, and furthermore, how those theories helped Bion to
rewrite and reinterpret his war.
One of the experiences that Bion retold on successive occasions was of
being in the front line around Wytschaete in Belgium, where, dispensing
with their tanks, they had been ordered to assist the infantry. It was very hot
under his tin-roofed shelter, and during his weeks watching the enemy lines
Bion became more and more confused. He writes in 1919:
I used to lie, tired out after the night, in a kind of stupor, which served instead
of sleep. It was a weird business—the heat, and the nightmares out of which
one started up suddenly in a kind of horror to find the sweat pouring down
one’s face. It was almost impossible to distinguish dream from reality. The
tat-tat-tat of the German machine guns would chime in with your dream
with uncanny effect, so that when you awoke you wondered whether you
were dreaming. The machine-gun made you think everything was genuine,
and only by degrees you recovered yourself to fall into uneasy sleep again.
It did not take long for interest in life to die out. Soon I found myself
almost hopeless. I used to lie on my back and stare at the low roof.
Sometimes I stared for hours at a small piece of mud that hung from the
roof by a grass and quivered to the explosion of the shells.41
The powerful and distorted reverberation of the big guns conspired in his stu-
por. Bion asks his parents to put themselves in his place: “Then imagine the
shell-fire. And in this district every gun and every shell echoed and re-echoed,
until at last the noise died away in weird booms and groans utterly unlike the
original sound. The sound was quite different from anything I know. If any-
thing was needed to complete the horror of that place, those echoes did it.”42
Bion also found his sense of vision overwhelmed; amid the crashing of shells,
his gaze was locked onto the clod of mud. This memory would reappear in A
Memoir of the Future, which describes how Captain Bion “stared at the speck
of mud trembling on the straw,” and again in All My Sins Remembered as Bion
describes treating shell-shocked soldiers during World War II.43
Bion’s account of the events at Wytschaete in The Long Weekend, written in
the 1970s with the hindsight of his now celebrated expertise on psychosis,
suggests the role that psychoanalysis came to play in locating and explicating
the source of his trauma. Now he emphasized the links between his stupor,
the inability to think, and the distortion of his sight:
For two more days nothing happened to break the monotony of constant,
vigilant staring at no-man’s land—the crater edge, the slow rise to the crest
of the ridge, the grey mud so similar in all but colour to Hill 40, inspired
136 Michael Roper
a state which was not nightmare, not waking, not sleep. It was an animal
existence in which the eyes held sway. One did not think; one did not
look; one stared.44
Perception, the psychoanalyst Bion would observe, is crucial to the mind’s

capacity to confirm reality and make sense of emotional experience. But in
the case of the psychotic, what happens is that the reality-confirming capac-
ity of the senses is itself attacked. Bion says of the psychotic patient that
“[a]ll his sense impressions appear to have suffered mutilation.”45 They may
become (in an intimation of shrapnel) “minutely fragmented” and violently
split off, encapsulating external objects, which in turn attack the self.46 In
Bion’s revised account of Wytschaete we are made to understand how ears
and eyes might become instruments of persecution.
The death of his runner in the battle of Amiens in August 1918 was another
experience that Bion repeatedly brought to mind. Having led his tanks into
action, Bion and Sweeting had taken cover from a heavy bombardment in a
ditch beside the Amiens-Roye road when a shell burst directly above them. In
the 1919 “Diary” Bion writes:
I heard a groan from Sweeting. The left side of his tunic seemed covered
with blood, and as I looked, I discovered that the whole of his left side had
been torn away so that the inside of the trunk lay exposed. But he was not
dead.
He was quite a young boy and was terrified, as he did not quite realize
what had happened. He tried to see what had happened, but I would not
let him. I pretended to bandage him, but of course the field dressing was
far too small and simply didn’t come near to covering the cavity. He kept
on saying “I’m done for, sir! I’m done for!,” hoping against hope I would
contradict him. This I did, telling him it was nothing—but his eyes were
already glazing over, and it was clear that death was even then upon him.
He kept trying to cough, but of course the wind only came out of his side.
He kept asking me why he couldn’t cough.
He gave me his mother’s address, and I promised to write.47
The 1919 account conveys a picture of a young officer who, acting in what
he feels are the best interests of one of his men, dissembles. He sees the gap-
ing hole in the young soldier’s side (Sweeting himself senses the seriousness
of his plight, as his question about coughing suggests), and his response is
to hide the true extent of the injuries from the dying man. His reassurance,
like the bandage itself, cannot conceal the catastrophic wound.
In the 1958 memoir “Amiens,” written on the eve of the 40th anniversary
of the battle, this account is altered in such a way as to sharpen the aspect
of failed containing. Sweeting’s wounds are more graphically described,
Bion recalling the “[g]usts of steam billowing out from his broken side.”48
Sweeting’s desperation to communicate to his mother is more forcefully
impressed upon his reader, Bion repeating the dying man’s injunction, “[M]
other, mother, mother,” at least four times in the text.49 Rather than con-
veying an attitude of trying to manage Sweeting’s distress, this and later
accounts emphasize Bion’s own terror and repugnance. Bion vomits “unre-
strainedly, helplessly” on seeing that Sweeting’s lung has been blown away,
a physical enactment of the incapacity to take in or introject. Whereas in
the 1919 “Diary” the dutiful officer Bion responds to Sweeting’s request by
promising to write, in the later accounts he is desperate not to hear. “Oh,
for Christ’s sake shut up,” he orders Sweeting, while in The Long Weekend
he pleads with him to “please, please, shut up,” and Bion himself begins to
whimper.50
Bion came to think of Sweeting’s death as one of his “old ghosts,” and in
The Long Weekend he goes so far as to say “then I think he died. Or perhaps
it was only me.”51 By the time of writing The Long Weekend, Sweeting’s death
had come to form a shape in Bion’s memory that closely fitted his psychoan-
alytic ideas. In 1919 his parents are presented with a raw account of a death
at close hand, and as if to reinforce the fact that it might just as easily have
been Bion who was hit, he encloses a photograph of at least two corpses on
the adjoining page, taken, he tells them, on a track just off the road where
Sweeting was hit.52 The visual image—a substitute, not Bion’s eyewitness
experience—serves to convey the horror. Bion tells his parents that he and
his fellow tank commander Hauser felt “very sick” about Sweeting’s death,
but he appears unable to reflect any further on its impact.53
The failure of maternal containing comes to define the traumatic event in
the 1958 version: Sweeting is desperate to reach his mother, and Bion, when,
called upon to act in lieu of a mother, reacts by violent projections from his
mind and body. Bion the psychoanalyst thought that reverie was not only a
quality of the mother, but of anyone who could listen, and in that context, it
is interesting to note his insistence on the reader understanding that he could
not bear to take in Sweeting’s distress.54 In his paper of 1959, “Attacks on
Linking,” he would give an account of a schizophrenic patient whose mother
had behaved in just this way:
I felt that the patient had witnessed in infancy a mother who dutifully
responded to the infant’s emotional displays. The dutiful response had
in it an element of impatient “I don’t know what’s the matter with the
child.” My deduction was that in order to understand what the child
wanted the mother should have treated the infant’s cry as more than
a demand for her presence. From the infant’s point of view she should
have taken into her, and thus experienced, the fear that the child was
dying. It was this fear that the child could not contain. He strove to split
it off together with the part of the personality in which it lay and project
it into the mother. An understanding mother is able to experience the
feeling of dread that this baby was striving to deal with by projective
identification, and yet retain a balanced outlook. This patient had had
138 Michael Roper
to deal with a mother who could not tolerate experiencing such feelings
and reacted either by denying them ingress, or alternatively by becom-
ing a prey to the anxiety which resulted from introjection of the baby’s
bad feelings.55
Bion, having experienced actual deaths, the fear of which he could not con-
tain, and which no mother had contained, came to psychoanalysis and to
the infant’s fantasies of dying with a heightened sensibility toward maternal
containing, and particularly toward catastrophic failures of containing.
Francesca and Home Life
In mid-March 1951 Bion met Francesca for the first time at the Tavistock Clinic.
Bion was then chairman of the Medical Committee, and she a researcher. He
soon took to lingering in the canteen, buying a second cup of tea in the hope
that he might see her.56 By the end of March he was writing passionate let-
ters to Francesca, in April they became engaged, and within four months of
meeting they were married.57 Bion was by then 54 and Francesca 29. Both had
been widowed, Bion’s first wife Betty Jardine, a well-known actress, dying in
childbirth in February 1945 while Bion was on overseas service as an army
psychiatrist, leaving him (inverting the usual war legacy of bereaved wives) a
lone father. Bion’s analysis with Klein, which terminated around 1952, occu-
pied the period roughly between Betty’s death and his marriage to Francesca.
The relationship with Francesca, although it took place over 30 years after
World War I, had elements of a veteran marriage. The war was present from
the start: at their first dinner together, recalled Francesca in 1997, Bion had
spoken about it “as if compelled to communicate haunting nightmares.”58
The psychoanalytic community was quick to endorse Francesca’s role in sup-
porting Bion. “I hear you are going to nurture genius,” Francesca recalls a
colleague remarking to her.59 Her role as a facilitator extended to helping
Bion reckon with the war. It was Francesca who, after Bion’s death, edited
and got into press the War Memoirs and The Long Weekend, rather like those
middle-class mothers who, after World War I, edited their dead sons’ letters
and diaries and published them as memorial books.
Much of what we know about the marriage comes from Bion’s letters to
Francesca, and to his three children (Parthenope, born to Betty Jardine in
1945; and two children born to Francesca, Julian in 1952 and Nicola in 1955),
which she published under the title “The Other Side of Genius.”60 Bion wrote
passionate letters to Francesca during their brief courtship and whenever
they were separated. These are striking in their emphasis upon her beauty.
Bion loved to conjure mind-pictures of Francesca. After returning late in the
evening from a group session at the Tavistock, he writes:
My darling you looked quite breath-takingly lovely today; even now I feel
the thrill as I see you in my mind’s eye. How I long to have you in my arms.
And then I think how much I just want to sit and watch you, my dear
sweetheart. Once I start thinking like this it is goodbye to all letter writing.
I go into a daze of happiness . . . 61
A few days later he writes of meeting a colleague, Ken Rice, and how Rice knew
without saying anything “what a tremendous thing it was for me that such
a beautiful woman loved me.”62 That he should be loved by such a woman
made him feel he was himself a success. He proudly mounted Francesca’s
photograph above the mantelpiece of his Harley Street consulting room, and
delighted in showing her off at parties held within Kleinian circles.63 That
feeling of being transfixed by the beauty of a woman was not new for Bion.
An engagement in the 1920s to a Miss Hall, the “extremely beautiful” sister
of a school-friend, had ended in bitter disappointment when she jilted him
for another man.64 His first wife Betty Jardine—whom Bion had first seen on
stage—was described by Eric Trist as “very warm, attentive, very intelligent
and very attractive.”65
The feeling of being in a daze of happiness is a constant theme in his letters
to Francesca. In his first letter to her on March 22, 1951, he writes of walking
home
with a great wind blowing hazy clouds across a moon which was never
visible but made all the trees stand out a deep grey against the silvery
meadows and water. And all the time I could see you, and still see you,
looking more ravishingly beautiful, as you did all the evening when I was
with you, than any one could believe possible.66
Bion expressed his happiness in the terms of dreaming: after proposing to

Francesca at the end of April, he writes, “[I]f this is a dream it is the longest
and most marvellous dream I have ever had; if it is not a dream then I don’t
know how to contain myself.”67
Why did the love of a beautiful woman matter so much to Bion? For sol-
diers during the war, wives and sweethearts were often felt to be crucial to
survival. The memory of the loved one, and the prospect of returning to
them, some felt, would sustain them through danger. When the shells were
“coming over and are falling unpleasantly near” him, the newly married
battery gunner Billy Wightman would think of his wife’s clothing, face,
and the smell of her perfume. “I want to live so as to come back to you, my
darling,” he wrote.68 The promise of love gave men a reason to survive, but
dreams of beauty also gave respite. Bion’s euphoric imaginings of Francesca,
33 years after the war, had a counterpoint in the visions of the war, which,
he intimates in All My Sins Remembered, continued to haunt him.69 In love,
he found himself enjoying his sleep, and in his psychoanalytic writings he
came to recommend the importance of sleep for the analyst, whose capacity
for reverie depended on freeing his mind from the pressure of immediate
thoughts and being able to “dream the session” without falling asleep.70
Bion experienced falling in love as the sloughing off of old defenses, and
he described this in terms that evoked the carapace of the tank. He told
140 Michael Roper
Francesca that his work was “coming alive; the dull numb mechanical routine
into which I have fallen is bursting wide open and it is all you my darling,
my darling Francesca.”71 This description resonates with an earlier flowering
of a very different kind, the blowing up of Lieutenant Cartwright’s tank at
Amiens. In his 1958 memoir Bion describes how “[s]uddenly its sides seemed
to open like a flower, a sheet of flame shot above it, and there lay the tank
with its sides bulged open and its roof gone. The bodies of the crew were flung
over the buckled walls, like the guts of some fantastic animal hanging out of
a vast gaping wound.”72 The feeling of love bursting open ancient defenses
is made more explicit in Bion’s letter a few days later: “I just feel very happy;
so inexpressibly happy. Even my crusted and hardened armour plate of fos-
silized worry seems to be shaling off each time I see you.”73 The concept of
reverie seems connected to his growing ability to dream, under the influence
of his love for the beautiful Francesca. “Darling, as soon as I start writing this
I find I get lost in reverie,” he told her in May 1951.74
Bion wanted the love of a beautiful woman, but he also wanted a home-
maker and mother. In agreeing to marry him, Francesca had relieved Bion of
the burden of being a sole parent, and freed him up to become a father. She
had “given Parthenope back to me and made me feel what it is like to have
a child,” he writes in April 1951.75 Because Bion was busy with his clients,
and so that Francesca would get to know her new stepdaughter better, they
decided that instead of going on a honeymoon (this would be delayed until
1958), she would take Parthenope on holiday to the south coast.76
The couple put great energy into establishing a new home. Soon after the
wedding Bion sold the cottage he had bought after Betty’s death, and he and
Francesca moved into a substantial house, Redcourt in Croydon. Bion was
excited by the prospect of redecorating the house, writing enthusiastically to
Francesca of his paint gun and whitewashing pump.77 Having been without
a partner for many years (he had often been separated from Betty during the
war), the thought of being looked after gave Bion great pleasure. In April he
writes, “You cannot imagine how good I feel when you say you will fetch me
a cup of tea. Darling, I love your doing things for me. I am just not used to it,
that’s all.”78 Like other World War I soldiers who had suffered the privations
of the Western Front, Bion knew how to care for himself in domestic matters,
but was deeply desirous of home comforts.79
Francesca occupied the role of homemaker and supported Bion’s professional
career for the remainder of their married life. While he took the children for
their annual holidays, she supervised the alterations to his consulting rooms
at their second home, Wells Rise in London, and she did the house-hunting
when they moved to America.80 In old age he continued to be touched by
Francesca’s attentiveness in domestic matters. After her departure for Los
Angeles in May 1969, Bion, who had stayed on in London, writes: “It seemed
very queer to come back to an empty house but nice to see the message in red
on the blotter. And the table set!”81
This was the kind of attentiveness that young soldiers in World War I,
separated from their homes, had looked forward to in their parcels (called,
significantly), “home comforts.” They wanted loved ones to intuit their

needs, for socks and underwear to arrive just as their supply was exhausted,
and for their favorite foods to arrive when they were needful. “I need not tell
you what I want because you always know best and anticipate me,” wrote
Graham Greenwell in a manner that expressed his gratitude, but also set a
certain standard of expectation.82 “Mummy is a veritable witch,” wrote Ged
Garvin to his father, “the towel came just right . . . ”83
Like these soldiers, Bion regarded empathetic anticipation as a sign of
maternal love. Indeed, this is the essence of his idea of maternal reverie.
For the infant to flourish, he felt, the mother had to possess the capacity to
remain unconsciously attuned to its needs, attending to them before it was
even fully aware of them. Bion writes that a mother who is capable of reverie
“can discern a state of mind in her infant before the infant can be conscious
of it, as for example when the baby shows signs of needing food before it is
properly aware of it.”84 Reverie requires the mother to possess a “psychologi-
cal receptor organ” capable of taking in the projective identifications of the
infant whether they are “good or bad.”85 Looking back in the 1990s on her
relationship with Bion, Francesca at one point describes herself as his “recep-
tor and confidante.” Her comment conveys a sense of how, in attending to his
domestic wants and creating a home for him, she helped shield him from the
demands of public life and supported his capacity to be creative.86 There are
significant parallels between young soldiers’ ideals of maternal care, Bion’s
concept of reverie, and Francesca’s role in the marriage to Bion.
In summer 1958, seven years after they were married, Bion and Francesca
finally celebrated their honeymoon with a week’s holiday in Paris. As they
passed through Amiens, almost 40 years to the day since the battle, Bion
began to compose his memoir. His commentary reveals the importance of
Francesca in supporting his creativity as a psychoanalyst and in helping him
to reckon with the war. The pockmarked ground over which they traveled,
wrote Bion—in a telling association with the mental marks of trauma—was
barely more disguised with weed and willowherb than it had been at the end
of the war. But rather than becoming bogged down in the memory of that
landscape, Bion fixed on Francesca’s beauty:
As the train sped through the complex of lines, I said to Francesca that it
seemed strange that it was almost forty years ago to the day when I had
last been here, and in such very different circumstances. It was a dream
for her to be sitting opposite to me—a girl so beautiful, so loving, so near
to a dream that I had always thought could never, never, never come to
pass for me.87
Secure in his psychoanalytic home and his home with Francesca and absorbed
in a reverie of her beauty, Bion was able to return to the psychic landscape
of Amiens in 1918, to Sweeting’s death, the blown-up tank of Cartwright,
the nauseous feeling of “impending disaster,” and his difficulties sleeping.
“[O]ne gets the most appalling dreams,” the character Bion tells his comrade
142 Michael Roper
Asser in the 1958 memoirs, and “when you wake up you don’t know whether
it wouldn’t have been better to go on sleeping.”88 In Francesca, we might say,
Bion had found a means of recovering his capacity to dream, a capacity that,
he would argue in Learning from Experience, was necessary in order to think.
* * *
Moving between Bion’s 1919 account of the war and his later psychoanalytic
concepts, I have tried to show the affinities between the landscape of trench
warfare experienced by Bion in his youth—its splintering projectiles, whose
violent explosions batter the senses; the human and mechanical carapaces
blown open—and the emotional landscape of the psychotic described by
Bion in later life. Others have remarked on the element of “tankishness” in
his clinical writings, but this tendency extended beyond the vocabulary of
psychoanalysis to his most intimate personal correspondence.89
Such affinities lead me to wonder about the connections in Bion’s life among
war, love, and psychoanalytic understanding. While World War I may have had
an influence on Bion’s ideas about psychotic states, equally, his psychoanalytic
sensibilities informed his efforts to reappraise the war.90 Lacking the capacity
of reverie, the violent events of trench warfare—epitomized in the nightmare
of slipping into the Steenbeck—had remained lodged within Bion’s mind into
middle-age, almost as if they were physical wounds. When he began to rere-
member the war in the late 1950s he was in the middle of his discoveries about
the maternal relation; the clinical developments seem related to his increased
capacity to remember the war, but at that point in his life the autobiographi-
cal and the psychoanalytic modes, though they run in tandem, remained
separate.
His psychoanalytic writings of that time keep a firm lid on historical
events. Bion steadfastly maintains the internal reality as his object of interest.
Early in the essay “Development of Schizophrenic Thought,” for example, he
states, “In this paper I ignore the environment.”91 The theories appear to be
derived exclusively from the clinical setting, even though—or perhaps pre-
cisely because—external events had intruded so violently upon Bion’s mind
40 years earlier. Concepts such as containing, nameless dread, and bizarre
objects gave a form to terrifying sensations that Bion had known from trench
warfare, but which he now claimed as universal psychic processes. Most
psychoanalytically informed commentaries on trauma—including those
on Bion himself—endorse such notions of the primacy of early experience,
traumatic events being seen to expose and exacerbate earlier psychic inju-
ries. His Amiens memory, remarks Kay Souter, is “a sort of literary equiva-
lent of a screen memory,” which “compresses all Bion’s childhood terrors”
of malevolent male violence.92 For Meg Harris Williams the associations are
more maternal, the prehistoric allusions in Bion’s descriptions of blown-up
tanks revealing a very early fear of “false mothers of the kind which trap
and consume their children.”93 No doubt Bion’s view of the maternal rela-
tion was colored by his childhood experiences. However the war itself was
also a source of deep disturbance, and he called upon all his psychoanalytic
resources to help detoxify his memory of it; creating, in the process, a model
of the mind in which the ultimate source of disturbance lay within early rela-
tionships and not the traumas of later life.94
As Bion grew older, he seemed both more compelled and more able to bring
the war and psychoanalysis into a relationship. As we have seen, in The Long
Weekend he rewrote events like the death of Sweeting and the blowing up
of Cartwright’s tank in a way that exemplified his psychoanalytic concerns
and concepts. No doubt by then Bion had his psychoanalytic readership in
mind, and although The Long Weekend does not engage in explicit psychoana-
lytic interpretation, it seems to encourage the reader in this direction, as the
numerous Bionian commentaries on it attest. In later texts, such as A Memoir
of the Future and the 1972 “Commentary,” Bion uses the technique of inter-
nal dialogue (e.g., between the characters “Captain,” or the psychoanalyst
“P. A.” and others) to juxtapose fragments of war memory and psychoanalytic
insight. Tellingly, in the Memoir of the Future it is the character “P. A.” who wit-
nesses Sweeting’s thoracic wall being blown out.95
It was not just his psychoanalytic understanding that supported Bion’s
remembering of the war in later life, but his personal and family relationships.
Bion was not unusual among World War I veterans in his sometimes fraught
attempts to secure a home and family, and perhaps not unusual either in seek-
ing feminine beauty as an antidote to his nightmares. His thoughts about
maternal containing and his depiction of the war as a catastrophic failure
of containing—symbolized in the dying Sweeting pleading for his mother—
resonate with the views of other veterans, who were frequently resentful of
women and yet needed their help to recuperate.96 Bion’s acute sensitivity
toward maternal failure marks him out as a member of the war generation.
Today Bion’s ideas remain influential in psychoanalytically inclined thera-
peutic circles. Within trauma theory, for example, the concept of contain-
ing is part of the standard vocabulary.97 In tracing the provenance of such
concepts, work on the history of psychoanalysis in Britain has tended to
emphasize the impact of World War II in the postwar “maternal turn.”98 Such
influences are certainly important but there are older legacies at work in
Bion. His theoretical formulations reflect the emergence of the welfare state
and its maternalist discourse, but they also drew upon the emotional land-
scape of World War I. The last eyewitnesses of World War I may be dead, but
the ubiquity of concepts like containing show how its influence continues
to be felt by subsequent generations; and in this sense we remain children
of World War I.
Notes
I would like to thank Timothy Ashplant, Bob Hinshelwood, Sean Nixon, and audiences
at Monash University and Newcastle University in Australia for their thoughts on this
chapter. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor for their
comments, and for having provided, through the IHR seminar series, a wonderfully crea-
tive forum for thinking about the relations between history and psychoanalysis.
144 Michael Roper
1. Wilfred R. Bion, War Memoirs 1917–19 (London: Karnac, 1997), 3.

2. Dan Todman, The Great War. Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005), 192–193.
3. Michael Roper, “Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Composure and Re-composure
of Masculinity in Memories of the Great War,” History Workshop Journal 50 (Spring
2000), 181–205.
4. In postwar Britain, writes Eli Zaretsky, “the relation to the mother came to dominate
analytic theory.” Secrets of the Soul. A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New
York: Vintage, 2005), 251.
5. In 1962 these essays were republished in Wilfred R. Bion, Second Thoughts. Selected Papers
on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1991).
6. Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 179. Kay Souter also concludes that Bion’s psychoanalytic
approach was “connected to his personal history in a profound way.” Souter, “The
War Memoirs: Some Origins of the Thought of W. R. Bion,” International Journal of
Psychoanalysis (2009), 90, 976. See also Paulo Cesar Sandler, “Bion’s War Memoirs: A
Psychoanalytical Commentary,” in Robert Lipgar and Malcolm Pines, eds., Building on
Bion: Roots, Origins and Context of Bion’s Contributions to Theory and Practice (London:
Jessica Kingsley, 1993), 59–87; and Margaret H. Williams, “The Tiger and ‘O’”: http://
human-nature.com/free-associations/MegH-WTiger&O.html, 1–21 (accessed August
25, 2009).
7. Bion, War Memoirs, 48; John Foley, The Boilerplate War (Slough: Frederick Muller,
1963), 71.
8. David Fletcher, ed., Tanks and Trenches. First Hand Accounts of Tank Warfare in the First
World War (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1994), 88; Bion, War Memoirs, 48, 52.
9. D. G. Browne, The Tank in Action (London: Blackwood, 1920), 158.
10. Quoted in Patrick Wright, Tank. The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London:
Penguin, 2000), 121. Browne writes that “the terrific explosion in the restricted space,
the whirlwind of flying white-hot metal, and the inevitable fire which follows, leave the
crew with a poor hope of escaping” (Browne, Tank in Action, 172).
11. Bion, War Memoirs, 6, 128.
12. Ibid., 133. On his fear of a direct hit, see ibid., 137.
13. Ibid., 185.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. Ibid., 199.
16. Bion’s partly completed volume dealing with his life after the war, All My Sins
Remembered. Another Part of a Life (London: Karnac, 1991), seems to have been drafted
around 1978. This, coupled with Bion’s work in the mid-1970s on A Memoir of the Future
(London: Karnac 1990), suggests that The Long Weekend 1897–1919. Part of Life (London:
1986) is likely to have been written in the early 1970s.
17. Sandler, “Bion’s War Memoirs,” 59.
18. Gérard Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion. His Life and Works 1897–1979 (London: Free Association
Press, 1994), 41.
19. Ibid., 35, 38.
20. Bion, War Memoirs, 207–208; The Long Weekend, 211.
21. Tom Harrison, Bion, Rickman, Foulkes and the Northfield Experiments. Advancing on a
Different Front (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), 20.
22. Dimitris Vonofakos and Bob Hinshelwood, “Wilfred Bion’s Letters to John Rickman
(1939–1951),” Psychoanalysis and History. 14, (2012), 53–94.
23. Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion, 52.
24. Bion, “The ‘war of nerves’: Civilian Reaction, Morale and Prophylaxis,” in Emanuel
Miller, ed., The War of Nerves. The Neuroses in War (London: 1940), 181.
25. Ibid., 191.
26. Bion, War Memoirs, 59–60, 67. On subaltern officers and domestic care in World War I,
see Michael Roper, The Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009), section II, “Mothering Men, 119–203.
27. Bion, “war of nerves,” 189.

28. Bion’s 1919 description of the eve of the Battle of Amiens, with his tanks in position
on the roadside, waiting for the bombardment to begin, strikingly evokes his later psy-
choanalytic concerns: “The strain had a very curious effect; I felt that all anxiety had
become too much; I felt just like a small child that has had a tearful day and wants to be
put to bed by its mother; I felt curiously eased by lying down on the bank by the side of
the road, just as if I was lying peacefully in someone’s arms” (Bion, War Memoirs, 122).
29. Ibid., 185.
30. Eric Trist, “Working with Bion in the 1940s,” in Malcolm Pines, ed., Bion and Group
Psychotherapy (London: Routledge, 1992), 6; J. D. Sutherland, “Bion-Re-visited,” in Pines,
ed., Bion and Group Psychotherapy, 48.
31. Wilfred R. Bion, “Group Dynamics,” in Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1961), 181.
32. Ibid., 179.
33. The impact of this second analysis on both his personal and professional life in this period
was no doubt far-reaching, although difficult to assess given the absence of documenta-
tion. Robert M. Young, “Bion and Experiences in Groups”: http://human-nature.com
/rmyoung/papers/pap148h.html, 3 (accessed on May 7, 2007).
34. See, e.g., Trist, “Working with Bion,” 5.
35. Isabel Menzies-Lyth emphasizes the importance of psychotic elements in Bion’s work
on both groups and individuals. Menzies-Lyth, “Bion’s Contribution to Thinking about
Groups,” in James Grotstein, ed., Do I dare disturb the universe? A Memorial to Wilfred R.
Bion (London: Karnac, 1983), 664.
36. Bion, Second Thoughts, 110–119.
37. Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Karnac, 1991), 36.
38. Bion, Second Thoughts, 114.
39. Ibid., 116.
40. Ibid., 37.
41. Bion, War Memoirs, 93–94. Sandler sees this as an instance of what Bion would later
describe as the “psychotic personality,” in which animate and inanimate are confused.
Sandler, “Bion’s War Memoirs,” 74.
42. Bion, War Memoirs, 93.
43. Bion, Memoir of the Future, 53; All My Sins Remembered, 59–60.
44. Bion, Long Weekend, 210.
46. Bion gives the example of a gramophone. To the psychotic patient whose perception
of sight has been spit off through processes of violent projective identification, the eye
seems to encapsulate the gramophone, which, at once controlled and controlling, then
seems to watch the patient. If the sensation of hearing is involved, the gramophone
appears to be listening to the patient. The external object, the gramophone, is, to the
psychotic, indistinguishable from the fragmented, split off, and now persecutory sensory
organ. Ibid., 40.
47. Bion, War Memoirs, 124–127. Mary Jacobus links Bion’s account of the blown-up tanks
at Amiens to Sweeting’s death, seeing both as instances of a failed maternal container.
Jacobus, Poetics of Psychoanalysis, 180–181.
49. Ibid., 255, 256, 289.
50. Ibid., 255; Bion, Long Weekend, 248–249.
51. Bion, Long Weekend, 249, 264.
53. Ibid., 127.
54. Robert Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books,
1991), 248.
56. Wilfred R. Bion, The Other Side of Genius (London: Karnac, 1991), 86.
146 Michael Roper
57. Ibid., 239. “This sounds rather like rushing from impulse to action without any inter-
vening thought,” commented Francesca in 1994; “be that as it may, the partnership
endured.” Francesca Bion, “The Days of Our Lives,” The Institute of Psychoanalysis,
http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/days.htm, 3 (accessed on December 10, 2010).
59. Bion, Other Side of Genius, 239.
60. Francesca Bion had the letters published largely because she felt the “unrelieved gloom”
of the war memoirs had presented a “false picture of the man who came to derive great
happiness and reward from his marriage, family and work” (ibid., 6).
61. Ibid., 81.
62. Ibid., 84
63. Ibid., 87.
64. Bléandonu perceptively notes that in Bion’s account of Miss Hall, apart from beauty,
“[n]one of her other characteristics is mentioned; we learn only that he was fascinated
by such beauty” (Bléandonu, Wilfred Bion, 40).
65. Ibid., 53.
67. Ibid., 95. In helping Bion to dream, comments Janet Sayers, Francesca’s love allowed
his psychoanalytic creativity to blossom. Janet Sayers, “Darling Francesca: Bion,
Love-Letters and Madness,” Journal of European Studies 32 (2002), 195–207. Sayers how-
ever does not ask why the capacity to dream might have meant so much to Bion; the
war is largely absent from her account.
68. W. O. Wightman to wife, May 20, 1918; July 14, 1918. Papers of W. O. Wightman,
Imperial War Museum document collection, 01/45/1. See Michael Roper, ‘Nostalgia
as an emotional experience in the Great War’, The Historical Journal, 54, no. 2, (2011)
421–451.
69. Bion, All My Sins, 16, 38.
70. “I must find a way of explaining to M. K. that I need sleep and then use it for writ-
ing!,” Bion remarks to Francesca from the International Psycho-analytical Congress in
1953. Bion, Other Side of Genius, 114. See also Wilfred Bion, “How to Keep Awake,” in
Cogitations (London: Karnac, 1992), 120.
72. Bion, War Memoirs, 254. In the 1919 memoir Cartwright’s tank was already alight when
Bion came upon it, but in the 1958 account Bion watches it burst into flames. The men-
tal impact of the experience, we might conjecture, reveals itself in the later accounts
when Bion makes himself a witness to the moment of catastrophe. See also his spoken
account on the sixtieth anniversary of Amiens (August 8, 1978), which recalls how the
bodies of the crew “poured out of the tank as if they were the entrails of some mysteri-
ous beast of a primitive kind” (Bion, Cogitations, 368).
74. Ibid., 96.
75. Ibid., 85.
76. Ibid., 95.
77. Ibid., 85.
78. Ibid., 87.
79. “Most ex-servicemen,” remarks Bion in 1940, “have learned the knack, in no mere aca-
demic school, of obtaining for themselves some sort of creature comforts in the most
adverse circumstances” (Bion, “war of nerves,” 195).
80. Bion, Other Side of Genius, 142, 145.
81. Ibid., 156.
82. Graham Greenwell, An Infant in Arms. War Letters of a Company Officer (London: Allen
Lane, 1972), 15.
83. Mark Pottle and John G. G. Ledingham, eds., We Hope to Get Word Tomorrow. The Garvin
Family Letters, 1914–1916 (London: Frontline Books, 2009), 47.
84. Bion, Learning from Experience, 34.
85. Ibid., 36.

86. Francesca Bion, “Days of Our Lives,” 10.
87. Bion, War Memoirs, 215–216.
88. Ibid., 236–237.
89. Souter, “The War Memoirs,” 796.
90. Ibid., 801.
92. Souter, “The War Memoirs,” 802.
93. Williams, “The Tiger and ‘O,’” 12. Similarly, in her review of The Long Weekend, Margot
Waddell describes Bion’s account of his time in tanks as a “representation of much
earlier meanings,” such as “primitive sexual anxieties, of birth and death” (Waddell,
“Essay Review of The Long Weekend 1897–1919: Part of a Life,” Free Associations: http://
human-nature.com/free-associations/longweekend.html, 9 [accessed October 7, 2010]).
94. Mary Jacobus points toward this kind of analysis, commenting that Bion’s later theories
“may serve as models or containers for the anxiety of annihilation aroused by traumatic
experience and memory” (Jacobus, Poetics of Psychoanalysis, 193).
95. Bion, Memoir of the Future, 256.
96. On the role of women in supporting the recovery of veterans after World War I, see
Roper, The Secret Battle, chapter 7, 276–314..
97. “The earthquake, the train-crash, the fire, the rape, the kidnapping, all represent a
massive failure of the maternal container,” remarks Caroline Garland. See “Issues in
Treatment: A Case of Rape,” in C. Garland, ed., Understanding Trauma. A Psychoanalytical
Approach (London: Karnac, 1998), 108.
98. See Denise Riley, The War in the Nursery. Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago,
1983), esp. chapter 4; Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth,
Middx.: Penguin, 1975), 227–231.
7
Primary Maternal Preoccupation:
D. W. Winnicott and Social
Democracy in Mid-Twentieth-
Century Britain
Sally Alexander
[I]t is to mothers that I have so deeply needed to speak.

—D. W. Winnicott, “The Mother’s Contribution to Society”1
Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) was an English pediatrician and psy-

choanalyst whose ideas were part of the ethical and practical thinking that
informed the British welfare state’s provision of need through its clinics,
hospitals, welfare centers, schools, and homes from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Winnicott has a distinguished if controversial reputation as one of the few
British psychoanalysts to make an original contribution to his discipline. His
ideas about mothers and infants, transitional objects, true and false selves
entered the national psyche through the forties and fifties, yet a social history
of his thought, which pays attention to its sources and its impact on the insti-
tutions and ethos of British social democracy in the mid-twentieth century,
has only just begun. As Peter Barham, historian of Britain’s shell-shocked
military, has remarked, history learns from psychoanalysis and then forgets
what it learned, as if unconscious—the deep and hidden parts of our selves—
mental lives of ordinary people are inaccessible or difficult to bear in mind
when writing historical narrative.2 British historians tend to believe that
human nature either resists historical events or is shaped by them; as if a con-
cern with the unconscious is at odds with history’s emphasis on real events in
time and place.3 Yet Winnicott’s studies of mother-infant relationships dat-
ing from his clinical work in London hospitals from the mid-1920s show how
closely the two dimensions of inner feeling and external world are linked.
149
150 Sally Alexander
Infant hallucination, Winnicott suggests, brings the child’s inner and exter-
nal worlds into existence. The newborn infant hallucinates his environment,
incorporates bits of it, and projects hallucinated objects and part objects out-
ward, and thereafter the outside world is only ever grasped through the imagi-
nation; fantasy is the “stuff of socialisation and civilisation.”4 The infant’s
capacity for hallucination in the first moments of life depends on the capacity
of the mother to feel with her child, to anticipate his needs (Winnicott’s infant
is usually male) in such a way that the baby—for whom the real and the imagi-
native are the same thing—experiences himself as “the creator of all.” If eve-
ryone around the mother and child (father, family, midwife, doctor) supports
this illusion, then a necessary condition of personal well-being is established.5
A mother’s psychic connection to her infant, Winnicott believed, begins
well before the child’s birth. During the last months of pregnancy, the mother
withdraws from everyday life, gathering her thoughts and being inward, cre-
ating a state of mind that is hallucinatory, indifferent to the world outside
herself and her child, close to psychosis, a sort of fugue feeling. This state of
mind is not available to every mother, some resist such preoccupation; it lasts
only a few weeks or months after the baby’s birth, giving way (or “failing”) as
the infant develops, and is not easily remembered. Winnicott gives a compel-
ling and economic account of this state of mind and generative relationship
in Human Nature (published posthumously, 1988, and compiled over 25 years).
The infant feels hunger; the mother meets the need with a gesture which ena-
bles the infant to reach for the breast. Descriptions of intimacy with the breast,
the relationship with the nipple, is the closest Winnicott comes to the erotic.
Nothing can be taken for granted in this encounter. Touch and gesture—like
integration—are fragile, suffused with strong feeling which may turn into its
opposite. The feeling needs of mother and infant in this relation are differ-
ent; the mother identifies (or not) with the child, the infant is dependent; the
infant’s hate, for instance, which springs Winnicott observes, from aggressive
greed and frustration, compels the fantasized destruction of the object (the
breast) and the emergence of the ruthless “I am” (the king of the castle) is
precipitated by maternal hatred of her baby (hence the truth of the nursery
rhyme “rock a bye baby from the tree tops,” etc).6 None of these feelings or
experiences, which pass from one generation to another, is hereditary, they
are underpinned by memory and experience (of infant as well as mother), nor
should they be interfered with. Winnicott’s anger is directed towards the puri-
tanical and sadistic rules of the maternity ward, which wrap the infant too
neat and tight, whisk the baby away from the mother, place them in separate
rooms where they cannot learn from one another. From its beginnings amni-
otic fluid comes between the embryo and the wall of the mother’s womb, a
separation Winnicott uses as a visceral metaphor for the individual through-
out life as an “isolate,”; this aloneness is then an incitement to fill the space
between one body and another, inside and out, imaginary and real, subjectiv-
ity and civilization with objects and illusions.7
The fascination and value of Winnicott’s ideas to the historian is that
Winnicott’s inner world is a “live world of movement and feeling,” responsive
to shared reality—breath, skin, bodily rhythm as well as nourishment—from
Primary Maternal Preoccupation 151
birth, or even before in the womb, kindled in relation to the mother (always
a particular mother), driven by hatred as well as love and embodied in a child
with both a past and a future.8 Winnicott’s vision is social—the maternal envi-
ronment, the two-body relation inaugurates subjectivity; the space between
them both instils what he calls the “maturational process,” and forms the
basis of creative life and culture. But Winnicott always kept part of his mind
on the institutions that formed civil society and in which he worked. Town
planning, public health and housing, hospitals, schools (including nursery
schools) staffed by reliable and tolerant professionals were the necessary con-
text of mental landscapes.9 But the foundations of the “democratic element” in
society, Winnicott believed, lay in families, in mothers and infants, under the
protection of fathers with their “genital potency” in “ordinary good homes”;
this “facilitating environment” was the seedbed of democracy.10
Winnicott was a clinician. He practiced child medicine (pediatrics was not
yet a separate medical discipline) from 1923 using psychoanalytic insights in
public clinics in Queens Hospital for Children in Hackney, and in Paddington
Green in West London. His private consulting room was in Marylebone,
London’s medical district, until the 1950s when, after his second marriage,
he rented a large house in Chelsea. He qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1934.
His ideas about human nature were built up through observation (Charles
Darwin was a mentor as well as Freud) and by listening to mothers and chil-
dren describe their lives and health. Observation was the test of fantasy.11
“Most of my ideas are inspired,” he wrote in an essay on fear of breakdown,
“by my patients to whom I acknowledge debt.”12
His first book, published in 1931 when he was 35, was written from the
“heart of a clinician”; the last essay collection published during his life, Playing
and Reality (1971), is dedicated to “my patients who have paid to teach me.”
By the time he retired from national health practice in the mid-1960s, he had
accumulated about sixty thousand case histories written up from interviews
with mothers or whoever (aunt, sibling, father) brought the child to see him,
plus notes taken during treatment. The questions Winnicott addressed were
those that preoccupied medical doctors and psychoanalysts of his time: what
makes healthy children, how does the mind/body relation operate, what sort
of public services are needed, what values should underpin those services,
and also what sort of science was psychoanalysis—how could it be made use-
ful to doctors and patients?
The clinic, where doctor and patient met—as equals, in Winnicott’s view—was
a place of democratic conversation between doctor and patient, akin—in this
respect—to the feminist-run mother-and-child clinics and birth control clinics
that were springing up throughout Britain in the early twentieth century.13 In
Winnicottian terms, the clinic was the transitional space where conversation,
play, transference, and new thinking happened.14 Clinical conversations with
mother and child shaped his views on unconscious mental life, complicating
his understanding of it without either psychopathologizing or patronizing his
patients’ inner worlds. In his case notes, drunken or bullying parents, uncul-
tured mothers, become “ordinary devoted mothers”—every time Winnicott
uses the word “ordinary” Adam Phillips points out, it represents a wish,15 a
152 Sally Alexander
wish born in the long aftermath of war and national suffering but also in hope
for future generations. .
Winnicott’s “history-taking” began in the 1920s, years of postwar recon-
struction and experiment, and continued into the mid-1960s—British social
democracy’s decades of achievement. He survived two world wars. His choice
of child health was made while he was a medical student at St. Bartholemew’s
Hospital London (Bart’s) and was utterly in keeping with the sense shared by
many of those who had lived through the first world war—that they owed
something to those yet to be born.16 Many of his friends had died in the first
years of war. He was never free, he wrote later, “from the feeling that my
being alive is a facet of some one thing of which their deaths can be seen as
other facets: some huge crystal, a body with integrity and shape intrinsical
(sic) in it.”17 The sentiment is uncharacteristically transcendental. He refused
the notion of the death-drive, introduced by Freud in 1919 in the aftermath of
death and mourning and developed later by Melanie Klein through her under-
standing of the punitive early super-ego. He could not think with this idea, he
repeated several times: we are born, we live, and we die. All the conscious force
of his writing was toward being alive, living life more fully.18 Deadness, stasis,
impotence, rigidity, compliance (the key characteristic of the “false self”)—
these were negatives in the Winnicott lexicon, symptoms of his patients’
psychic deaths, their “primitive agonies.”19 Nevertheless death is everywhere
in his work and thought. Mothers and children died of diphtheria, pneumo-
nia, meningitis, or encephalitis before the invention of penicillin in the late
1930s; fathers killed and were killed in war (he wrote little about fathers but
when he did so in 1944, he said that their first task was to stay alive).20 Some
of his patients wanted to kill him; at least one committed suicide (in 1968,
when Winnicott himself was ill); “many men and women spend their lives
wondering whether to find a solution by suicide.”21 The contraceptive pill, he
described as a “silent kill.” He spent his last years fearful of his own death (like
his child patients in London hospitals during the 1920s and 1930s he suffered
from cardiac disease from his mid-forties), and the autobiography that he
began toward the end of his life opened with his own death.22 Death, which
haunts the mind of the oedipal child (and often rivives as bloody murder in
the mind of the adolescent), seemed thinkable to Winnicott only if active,
excitable.23 Knowledge of death was the legacy of World War I.
Winnicott’s intense interest in the lives and minds of his patients was part
of a wider curiosity about the recently literate and enfranchised people in the
aftermath of total war.24 War and poverty in the early twentieth century had
exposed the nation’s chronic ill health. Women’s suffrage (1918, 1928) helped
to place mother and child in the foreground of social policy. Government sur-
veys of unemployment and economic depression through the interwar years
served as spurs to planners’ blueprints for Britain’s new Jerusalems of the 1940s
and 1950s, when the thinking nation—or at least its governing elites—was
gripped by the imperative “never again”: never again war, economic depres-
sion, overcrowding, unemployment.25 London’s boroughs were home to radi-
cal experiments in housing and medical health.26 Winnicott’s history-taking,
as it followed his patients’ symptoms, tell brief stories of lives in their time.
Between the undergrowth of his patients’ dream worlds and nightmares and
the social conditions of their lives lies a seam of mid-twentieth-century lib-
eral thinking to set beside the demographic and economic anxieties of the
period.27 As a young consultant pediatrician using psychoanalytic insights
in the 1920s and 1930s, Winnicott was part of a humane medical thinking
that proved stronger than the negative eugenicist advocacy of selective breed-
ing for racial health, elimination of the unfit, to right the imbalance in the
birthrate of rich and poor as solutions to social disease.28 Heredity played a
part in human personality, Winnicott acknowledged; but the accumulation of
experience—not racial memory or animal instincts—enabled infant satisfac-
tion, growth, and development. Democracy should not rely on a prescriptive
set of rules but on mature individuals thinking for themselves (consciously
and unconsciously), on toleration of ideas, and on the recognition that we are
not so different—in our greed, aggression, and deceit—from our enemies.29
Trust the unconscious, not the rational planners, was his plea.
During the 1940s Winnicott worked with government-sponsored schemes
for evacuated children in local authority homes in Oxfordshire, an experi-
ence that confirmed his belief in the benefits of adapting to circumstance
and human need rather than following a rigid plan.30 After the war he moved
away from pediatrics to work full time as a psychoanalyst while still running the
department of child psychiatry at Paddington Green Hospital (which he had to
defend against closure in the early 1950s). He increasingly took on psychotic or
borderline patients, adults as well as children, developing his technique—con-
troversially—to include regression and touch as well as transference. Excluded
from the warring coteries of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud in the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, during the 1940s, he went his own way, recasting his under-
standing of human nature in a series of seminal papers.
He gave many talks—to teachers, social workers, philosophical societies, free-
thinkers—because he believed that knowledge of the Freudian unconscious and
an understanding of the emotional development of the child were essential for
everyone working in the professions of “concern” even though few would have
the will, time, or money to train as psychoanalysts. His recommendations to
the 1948 Children’s Act (cowritten with Clare Britton, the social worker who
became his second wife and guardian of his memory for 15 years after his
death) introduced a psychodynamic element into social-work training. He
consistently opposed the increasing use of psychosurgery in the 1940s and
1950s, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Insane persons, he pointed out,
often asked for their minds to be destroyed or taken away. When a patient felt
better after ECT, he suggested, it might be because the treatment satisfied her
suicidal desire, while conversely the brutality of the treatment satisfied the
doctor’s unconscious sadism.31 He wrote urgently to his fellow psychoanalyst
John Bowlby when he discovered that Bowlby’s work on maternal attachment
was being used to legitimate the closure of day-nurseries, which in his view
were of value to parent and child.32 His BBC broadcasts between 1939 and
1962 reached into the kitchens and living rooms of “ordinary families,” and
154 Sally Alexander
some of his words and phrases—gleaned from his patients’ conversations—

slipped into common speech (“the ordinary devoted mother,” “transitional
object,” “good enough homes”). His broadcasts reassured parents that they
should continue to do what they already do well, and that psychology—here
he echoed Freud—merely consisted of that “which people have been able to
know always, by feeling and by simple observation.”33
If few historians of the welfare state recognize the contribution to humani-
tarian feeling made by D. W. Winnicott before and after World War II, femi-
nists by contrast—always ambivalent toward motherhood—have criticized his
emphasis on maternal responsibility. In the 1970s and 1980s Elizabeth Wilson
was one of the first to note the relentless association of women with mother-
hood in the psychoanalytic literature of evacuation and delinquency during the
1940s; she and others criticized the ways in which the economic dependency of
wife and mother within the family was written into National Insurance. Anna
Davin definitively linked the education of motherhood with imperialist aims
and policies at home and in the colonies. Winnicott’s ideas about mother and
child in the context of 1940s “pro-natalist” policies were used to obliterate
women’s diverse circumstances inside and outside the family, Denise Riley
argued, as if the mother and the worker were two separate species.34 Feminists
since the 1970s have worked hard to reimagine womanhood against the man-
tra that “a woman’s place is in the home,” showing how desire for work, love,
and children might be reconciled. But Winnicott’s own view of the feminist,
as he propounded it in the 1960s, was reductive (she wants or imagines she
has the penis); his attitude to the pill ambivalent (it kills, and nourishes anxi-
eties that women might lose their womanliness).35 His focus on woman as
mother, his lack of curiosity about any other element of feminine sexuality,
undoubtedly helped shut tight the Pandora’s box of women’s desire and aspi-
ration in the 1950s and 1960s.36 As one young woman protested in a seminar
on Winnicott’s place in modern British history, “[W]omen are only mothers
for Winnicott . . . ”37 On the other hand, feminist psychotherapy from the late
1970s has made extensive use of Winnicott’s ideas about mother and infant
and the “facilitating environment.”38
The welfare legislation of Clement Attlee’s Labour government between
1945 and 1948—national insurance, child allowances, and the National
Health Service—had complex origins in the minds of independent thinkers
in universities, the civil service, and the law courts; some had a long ges-
tation in the Labour Movement and in feminist organizations seeking bet-
ter maternity provision, improved child health, and education.39 Like other
intellectual architects of the welfare state, John Maynard Keynes and William
Beveridge, Winnicott was not a socialist but a liberal.40 With the British
Medical Association, he opposed that part of the National Health Bill that
he thought would lead to the “nationalisation of doctors”; he believed always
in individual freedom of thought—bureaucracies, he pointed out, don’t
think.41 Social structure was “brought about, maintained and constantly
reconstructed by individuals, there is no personal fulfilment without soci-
ety,” he wrote, “and no society apart from the collective growth structures
that compose it.”42 Never part of a governing elite, Winnicott had no politi-
cal power, but he exerted influence on public opinion through his teaching,
writing, and broadcasts. He used his administrative positions in the Institute
of Psychoanalysis to further the cause of psychoanalysis through letter writ-
ing, committee serving, and report writing.43 Winnicott had something both
simple and profound to say: the world was recreated anew with the birth of
each infant, and because real equality rested on the maternal environment—
always so various—it was perhaps unobtainable but should be striven for
nonetheless.
Winnicott’s concerns with child health, the environment and institutional
care links him to the urban and regional surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, but
his preoccupation with observing and listening to his patients brings him
closer to the work of Mass Observation, the British documentary movement
(John Grierson’s “looking at reality with imagination”), and J. B. Priestley and
George Orwell’s journeys into England during the 1930s and 1940s. The com-
mon view from all these sources was of a British people who were “decent,”
“kindly,” and tolerant.44 Winnicott’s individual, however, was more compli-
cated than this; fractured, internally divided, moments of madness in every-
one’s life bring the self close to the psychotic in herself. A mother’s absolute
absorption in her newborn child—“primary maternal preoccupation”—is one
of these moments. Destructive instincts such as primitive greed and hatred
vie with love and concern for others in human subjectivity. Any economics
that does not take into account greed—meaning not the sort of greediness
that a “child gets slapped for” but greed as “the primitive love impulse, the
thing we are all frightened to own up to, but which is basic in our natures and
which we cannot do without unless we give up our claim to physical and men-
tal health”—is without value.45 Winicott’s ideas, borrowed directly from his
patients’ inner worlds, led him not into utopia—whether the new Jerusalem,
racial purity, the occult, or world citizenship all of which were ideals of his
time—but into “the inherent difficulties of life.”46 The present struggle, not
“future hope” is life.47
* * *
Donald Winnicott was born in 1896 in Plymouth, Devonshire, the only son
and the youngest of three children. His father Frederick was a retail merchant
(specializing in women’s corsetry) and a Methodist with a strong sense of
civic responsibility, Winnicott remembered him as seldom at home. Twice
mayor of Plymouth, Frederick was knighted in 1925. His lack of education,
Frederick told his son, was the reason he did not enter national politics.48
Winnicott abandoned his Methodism at university, but his sense of public
service went beyond personal ambition and owed something to his father’s
example.
Winnicott’s mother is more elusive. His own liveliness and playfulness was
honed to her depressions, according to family lore. Certainly his letters to his
mother from school and university are alive and eager. His most powerful
156 Sally Alexander
image of their relationship, contained in a poem written in his sixties and

sent to the brother of his first wife, is of a pieta:
stretched out on her lap

As now on dead tree . . .
I learned to make her smile
To stem her tears
To undo her guilt
To cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living.49
Winnicott remembered “multiple mothers.” His sisters, Violet and Kathleen,

were five and six years older than him. Educated, unmarried, they lived at
home, occupied with music, art, philanthropy, and caring for their parents.50
The family employed a governess, cook, at least two parlor maids and his nanny
Alice, with whom Winnicott kept in close touch for over fifty years.51 He loved
spending time in the “kitchen quarters” as he did throughout his life (knock-
ing on the door of his own servants’ sitting room in Hampstead in the 1930s
and 1940s; visiting his matron for tea at Paddington Green). The large family
house in Plymouth was shared for seven years of Winnicott’s childhood with
cousins, who then moved close by, the two households keeping open doors.
Aged 14 Winnicott was sent away to Leys, a Methodist boarding school in
Cambridge. His father wanted to prise him away from all these women and
servants and to “mend his manners”. He seems to have relished school and uni-
versity; he was athletic, sang in the choir, played the piano, drew, and he was
also a scout. He completed his medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital
(Bart’s), adding opera and dancing to his pleasures. He had read Darwin at
school and became an enthusiast, buying his books from Cambridge second-
hand bookstalls with money his mother sent him.52 In 1914 he went up to Jesus
College, Cambridge University, to read biology, physiology, and anatomy, grad-
uating with third-class honors in 1916. While an undergraduate, Winnicott
volunteered on the wards of a Cambridge College converted into a military
hospital and in 1917 he interrupted his studies for ten months to enlist in the
Royal Navy as a surgeon probationer (the youngest officer) on a destroyer.
Frederick had wanted his son to enter the family business but Donald
resolved to become a physician after a spell in the school sickroom with a
broken collar bone convinced him that the only way to avoid dependence on
doctors was to become one. He asked a school friend to break the news of his
choice of career to his father by letter. Winnicott’s reticence with his father
continued. When he fell in love with Clare Britton 30 years later, while still
married to his first wife, he waited until after his father’s death (1948) before
starting divorce proceedings.53
Winnicott told two stories—parables—about his father. The first was about
reparation. As a child of three, with a croquet mallet he deliberately cracked
open the head of his sister’s doll Lily, whom he very much loved, (Winnicott’s
own doll was named Rosie). His father repaired the head by melting it down
and patiently remolding it. The second anecdote was about tolerance and truth.
Once as a young man seeking to resolve a theological question, which might

have led to argument, he asked his father for some reading: read the Bible, his
father advised, and what you will find there will be the true answer for you.54
Winnicott practiced Anglicanism at Cambridge (perhaps for musical reasons).
Like many other classically educated English men (and some women), he devel-
oped an interest in comparative religion at Bart’s. He read some eastern phi-
losophers and wrote at least one paper on faith.55 His Christian beliefs vanished
(only to shadow his thought), but he never lost interest in why people believe
what they do. Faith is vital to emotional development he believed, it kept people
alive, healthy, and creative; scientific work itself was a matter of faith: of asking
the right questions, having faith in the outcome (which was never a resolution
but just new questions) and letting time do its work.56
When Winnicott qualified in 1920, he was appointed casualty officer and
houseman at Bart’s for a year or two; he was admitted to membership of the
Royal Society of Physicians “in due course.”57 In 1923 he was appointed con-
sultant at the Queen’s Hospital for Children in Hackney, where the London
County Council’s rheumatic and heart clinic was based, and of which he took
charge for the next ten years. He was also appointed physician at Paddington
Green Children’s Hospital, where his clinic for mothers and children ran for
over 40 years. In July of the same year he married his first wife, the potter
Alice Buxton, and began analysis with James Strachey, a lay analyst, transla-
tor of Freud, in Bloomsbury. He was 27 years old.
Winnicott was the first doctor of child medicine to train as a psychoanalyst.
He went into analysis because he had “personal difficulties,” and he wanted to
introduce psychoanalysis into his work with children.58 He had read Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams at Cambridge, because he had stopped dreaming and
wanted to find out why; his dreamworld, according to his second wife, was
a constant undercurrent of his life.59 Freud immediately excited his ambi-
tion. Outlining the principles of psychoanalysis to his sister Violet in 1919,
he instructed her to tell him if the ideas were not clear because he wanted to
introduce the subject to English readers in a way that was so straightforward
and simple that—he quoted Samuel Johnson—“he who runs can read.”60
Alice, his first wife, was a family friend and neighbor a few years older
than he. Her father was a Methodist and a professor of gynecology at the
University of Birmingham (a subject Winnicott failed three times). Donald
and Alice, who were married for 25 years, lived in austere bohemianism in
Hampstead (except for two servants). They had no children. While he worked
in London hospitals, training as an analyst, they took at least one troubled
child into their home to live with them.61 Alice had psychotic episodes
throughout her life. They divorced in 1949, several years after Winnicott had
met Clare Britton working with evacuee children. Winnicott continued to
support Alice financially.
Ernest Jones, the Welsh doctor, president of the British Institute of
Psychoanalysis and Freud’s colleague, who saw Winnicott for consultation in
1923, recalled an “inhibited” young man. He sent him to James Strachey in
Bloomsbury. Strachey himself was a novice. He had had a few weeks’ analysis
with Freud (on his honeymoon in 1920); his life work on the Standard Edition
158 Sally Alexander
of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (SE ) published by the Hogarth Press had
not yet begun.62 The analysis with Strachey lasted ten years. Strachey differed
from Winnicott as a psychoanalyst and Englishman. Strachey was born into
the governing class—his father was in the Indian Civil Service. One of 12 chil-
dren, Strachey’s effort at medical training (encouraged by Jones who hoped
for medical recognition for psychoanalysis) had lasted barely one month spent
dissecting frogs’ legs.63 Yet Strachey would always be his “model” of an analyst,
Winnicott wrote in Strachey’s obituary, because he was well-read (Winnicott
often sent significant new papers to Strachey to read), a linguist, his notion
of “love” learned from the Quakers he met as a conscientious objector during
World War I.64 Freud’s essay on lay-analysis (1926) might have been written
with Strachey in mind.65 They had in common perhaps, a non-conformist
ethic as well as no children and work as psychoanalysts.
We glimpse Winnicott’s first marriage in the gossipy letters exchanged between
Strachey and his wife Alix while she lived in Vienna and Berlin.66 “Winnie,” as
the Stracheys called him, was unable to consummate his marriage.67 Winnicott
himself wrote little about adult sexuality or marriage. The mother needs “sexu-
ally satisfying experiences”; every child needs the fantasy of the genital rela-
tion between the parents to attack and kick against; primal fantasy is taken for
granted. However, the destructiveness and cruelty that results from inhibition is
a theme throughout his writing; in a discussion of the capacity to dream and to
achieve potency (or its female equivalent) during the adolescent’s transition to
adulthood he states baldly that “[i]mpotence can hurt more than rape.”68
In the year before his death, Winnicott reflected on living creatively within
marriage. He encouraged the development of different interests between hus-
band and wife as the children grew up. A husband and wife too fearful to
pursue separate interests, he ventured, risked boredom or “clamping down
on creative living.” Some marriages felt stifling, others followed patterns too
rigid for growth. But if we begin to talk about sex, Winnicott went on, then
“we shall find the most amazing quantity of distress everywhere.” “[I]t is the
psychoanalyst’s misfortune,” he told his listeners, “that he knows more about
these difficulties and the distress that goes with them than most people do.
It is not possible for the psychoanalyst to maintain the illusion that people
get married and live happily ever afterwards, at any rate in their sexual life.”
Only imagination and empathy—the capacity to put oneself in the place of
another—might help one another, he added. He refers to the Edward Albee
play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as a study of “a child that is conceived of,
but without taking flesh.”69 The difficulties of conceiving (in any meaning of
the word) a child is expressed elsewhere. In an autobiographical comment to
the Scientific Committee of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, he con-
fessed that it took him five years practicing as a child physician to see that “a
baby was human at all.”70 Some notes on perversion and pregenital fantasy
describe the wonder parents feel when they experience the miracle of a child
born from the womb rather than from their darkest imaginings, formed from
parts of the insides of bodies, born anally, or made of clay.71 Winnicott brooded
on bodies, his own and those of his patients, throughout his working life.
Because James Strachey said he knew nothing about children he sent

Winnicott to Melanie Klein for child observation in the late 1920s or early
1930s, an encounter that began a long relationship of respect as well as antago-
nism.72 Klein’s revelations of the infant’s rivalrous feelings toward her mother
based on phantasies about the insides of her body found a receptive audience
among British psychoanalysts, and she settled in London in 1926 with Ernest
Jones’s encouragement and invitation to analyze both his children and his
wife.73 When Winnicott qualified as an analyst in 1934 (his training had
begun in 1927), he decided that he wanted to do his second analysis—which
would prepare him to become a training analyst—with Klein, who refused
him because she wanted him to analyze one of her children under her super-
vision. This he refused, although he did analyze her son Erich for several
years in the mid-1930s, independently. Klein meanwhile supervised some of
Winnicott’s cases between 1935 and 1940, and he began his second training
analysis in 1935 with Joan Riviere, a close colleague of Klein’s.74 Riviere, like
Strachey, had come to psychoanalysis through the Psychical Society before
World War I. She had been analyzed by Freud, and was an eloquent transla-
tor of his work.75 Through this tangled web of analyses, transference, and
countertransference, Winnicott qualified as a training analyst in 1940, as
the Nazi Luftwaffe bombarded London and furious debates in the British
Society of Psychonalysis between Kleinians and Anna Freudians, known as
the ‘Controversial Discussions’ almost tore it apart.
As a pediatrician and psychoanalyst (just as a small child in Devon)
Winnicott often found himself a man among women. Members of the
British Psychoanalytic Society in the 1920s included Mary Chadwick,
Barbara Low, and Nina (M.N.) Searl who had pioneered child analysis before
Melanie Klein gave her first lecture there in 1925.76 Some, like Alix, wife
of James Strachey, had traveled to Vienna and Berlin to be analyzed by
Freud, Rank, Abraham, or Ferenczi, supplementing analyses in the London
Medico-Psychological Clinic (1913–1919, founded and run by two women),
the London Society, or the British Institute of Psychoanalysis established
in 1919.77 These analyses were brief, often lasting only a few weeks or less.
Winncott, Susan Isaacs, and Nina Searl were among the first trainees on the
newly established British Society training course in 1927, initiated by Ernest
Jones, on the lines of Berlin and Vienna and recognized by the British
Medical Association (BMA) in 1929.78 In the early 1920s, membership of
the British Society included medical psychiatrists, visitors from empire,
one pediatrician. Numbers (which reached about four hundred by 1940)
increased with exiles from fascist Europe during the 1930s, thanks to Jones’s
determined vigilance.79 Sigmund and Anna Freud and their families arrived
in 1938. But British psychoanalytic practice—hybrid, cosmopolitican, with
roots in empire—also developed its own vernacular through medical prac-
tice among the London poor, and an interest in child analysis evident before
World War I, ten years before Freud made his appeal to take psychoanalysis
to the poor at the 1918 International Congress.80 Winnicott’s personal his-
tory and training followed this trajectory.
160 Sally Alexander
Ernest Jones had delivered babies and studied disease in London hospi-
tals at the turn of the twentieth century. He was working in a combination
of private practice and short-term medical posts (his ambition to become a
consultant neurologist in a teaching hospital having been thwarted) when
he read Freud’s case history “Dora” and resolved to learn German in 1908.81
Experiments with psychoanalytical ideas in medical inspections in London
schools in 1906 and again in 1908 forced him to leave London for Canada
for four years as he was prosecuted for inappropriate behavior.82 Jones’s
friend at this time, David Eder, a socialist doctor and Zionist whom Freud
claimed as the first British psychoanalyst, also examined the “nervous trau-
mas hidden in the starved little bodies” of East End children in London
County Council (LCC) schools before 1914, and Eder too worked with the
Medico-Psychological Clinic and the London, later the British, Society.83
The first two papers presented to the new British Psychoanalytic Society’s
weekly meetings in 1919 were on motherhood, the first about the infant in
the womb, and in 1920 Ernest Jones asked members for psychoanalytic com-
mentary on child analysis.84 Meanwhile Freud’s observation of his grandson’s
“fort-da” game revealed the power of repetition to enable the child to master
his mother’s absence and presence, and precipitated the reconstruction of his
model of the psyche via the death instinct in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
(1919)—a concept as divisive inside the psychoanalytic community as the
Oedipus complex has been outside it.85 By 1924 child analysis was widespread
throughout Europe, though in Britain the idea of the child, before Melanie
Klein and Winnicott’s work, was moralized.
The British Society of Psychoanalysis was always an amalgam of differ-
ent intellectual influences (Winnicott thought this diversity its strength). If
first-generation British psychoanalysts, including the central European exiles
who joined them in the 1930s, had been formed through transnational line-
ages of transference and identification, then Winnicott followed Jones and Eder
through London’s teaching hospitals. The “psychoanalytical soil” in which
Winnicott’s clinical work flourished in the 1920s was an emerging profession
with fierce competing claims to Freud’s legacy; the Oedipus complex was the
central insight of psychoanalysis; personal (and self) analysis – following the
rule of “free association”- its method of training. Patients – and there were very
few of them, too expensive and time-consuming Winnicott always believed –
were referred by colleagues (Klein, Jones, Alice Balint, Ella Sharpe, among others
made referrals to Winnicott). Winnicott’s psychoanalytic practice, with its deep
“tap-root” in the concern with mother and child health forged during the inter-
war years in London hospitals, reached beyond the rivalries of the Institute.
Winnicott was based in London during the war but “left cold” by the “The
Controversial Discussions” between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud and their
followers (mostly women) which took place between 1943 and 1944 at the
Institute of Psychoanalysis.86 Controversy centred on the meanings and uses
of infantile phantasy, the force of instincts and their implications for training.
When Melanie Klein began analyzing her own children in the early 1920s in
Budapest, she used play as the equivalent of free association in adult analysis,
by this means uncovering the devouring and sadistic passions (phantasies) the
infant felt toward her mother’s body, first the breast, then its imaginary con-
tents, which included milk, feces, penis. These aggressive phantasies aroused
a strong primitive superego, punitive and cruel, which demonstrated, she
argued, that the Oedipus complex began in the first months or even weeks
of life, much earlier than the two and a half to five years suggested by Freud.
Anna Freud, 13 years younger than Klein, her father’s “Antigone”, believed
that the infant’s inner world developed more slowly than Klein allowed and
that the analyst should incorporate the strengths of the parental relation-
ship in order to support the child’s weak ego development.87 Arguments over
the sources and meaning of unconscious fantasy, the timing of the Oedipus
complex, the formation and content of the superego and death drive, and
the psychological significance of the external environment were never
resolved. Eventually a compromise—a “ladies agreement”—was reached. A
“woman-ridden” profession, Edward Glover, a leading British psychoanalyst,
remarked on his resignation in 1944 in the middle of the fray.88 A training
program with separate courses, Kleinian and Anna Freudian, was established,
a division that Winnicott at first resisted and then came to believe would
eventually disappear.89 Winnicott became part of the “middle” group or
Independents.90 He regarded Melanie Klein’s elaboration of the infant’s inner
world as “foundational” and consistently recommended Klein as the best and
most creative analyst in the Institute91 – his second wife Clare had a tempes-
tuous training analysis with Klein in the 1950s. Yet he also acknowledged
the value of Anna’s insights into the prenatal infant, and her work in the
Hampstead War Nurseries. Nevertheless he felt “kept out” by both Klein and
Joan Riviere (his training analyst) during the forties and fifties. They mis-
trusted him, thought him more interested in the outside world than inner
reality; yet—he wrote to Riviere in a letter so defensive you want to hold his
hand—he felt he had something to contribute to their work, although he
knew he would never be a mother.92 (He was never a father either of course).
After World War II, marginalized by both the Kleinians and “the Viennese”
(as he named Anna Freud and her followers), rarely allowed to teach at the
Institute, Winnicott returned often to the differences between him and Klein,
using her ideas to clarify and develop his own.93 His membership paper to the
Institute on “Manic Defence” (1935) was a paean to Klein’s understanding of
the child’s inner world—which incorporated not only good and bad objects,
parents or parts of parents, but bodily feeling, unconscious “sadistic attacks”
against the mutually loving parents. Manic defense refers to the infant’s flight
from or defense against feelings of anxiety and guilt aroused by his aggressive
instincts of hate and primitive love.94 Greed and hatred brought hallucinated
and real objects into being, but though he believed in some moment of inte-
gration that Klein named the “depressive position,” he found the latter term
inadequate, too fixed, thinking instead in terms of the infant’s gradual disil-
lusionment with the idealized breast, his or her realization of the mother’s
distraction, and Winnicott proposed depression, the sense of aloneness, as
a prelude to—a necessary condition for—the infant and child’s developing
capacity for thought and living which continues through life. He refused, as we
have seen, the death instinct. Klein’s later understanding of envy, he thought,
162 Sally Alexander
had something constitutional and therefore hereditary about it. Envy for
Winnicott was a secondary emotion; like pity, it depended upon “some degree
of ego organisation,” the capacity to imagine another object separate from
oneself.95 But the consistent sticking point between him and the Kleinians
was Winnicott’s emphasis on environment. This was where he parted from
“object relations.” When he told his training analyst Joan Riviere that he was
interested in the environment, he recalled, she “wouldn’t have it.”96
Winnicott’s environment meant mother and infant, the facilitating envi-
ronment; it reached toward father, siblings, doctor, nurse, hospital, school
culture; and it also referred to the internal environment, an inner space for
silence, reflection, the generation of excitement, and creativity.97 He worked
with real mothers not Klein’s “mother”; when thinking of the infant from
the first moments of birth, there was always someone there on whom the
infant depended—this is what he meant by “there’s no such thing as a baby.”
Objects were real, they had an independent life. The infant introjected and
projected fantasized objects and part objects, but the object was also there to
survive the infant’s destructive force.98 He also located fantasy on the inside
of the body, a way of understanding it, he wrote, which “Mrs. Klein did not
like.” The elaborations of fantasy can be observed in the very young infant,
and constitute the “inner world”: “the word ‘inner’ . . . applies primarily to the
belly, and secondarily to the head, and the limbs and any part of the body.
The individual tends to place the happenings of fantasy inside and to identify
them with the things going on inside the body.”99 The psyche is forged out of
the elaboration of the body’s functioning is how he always put it later.100 He
insisted on the value of using language in one’s own way.
In a 1957 BBC broadcast Winnicott attributed his concern with mother-
hood to his relationship with his own mother: “For my own part, I happen
to have been drawn towards finding out all I can about the meaning of the
word ‘devotion’, and towards being able, if possible, to make a fully informed
and fully felt acknowledgement to my own mother.”101 Ten years earlier, in
the gripping and groundbreaking essay “Hate in the Counter Transference”
(1947), he makes clear that the mother’s hate is as vital a part of devotion as
love in the coming- to-life of the child.102 There was nothing sentimental in
this encounter, he stressed, likening the analyst in the clinical setting to the
mother.103 Winnicott’s deliberate seeking out and valuing of what the ordi-
nary mother had to say about her child marked him out as a doctor, analyst,
and a writer. An early (1930s) handwritten list of physical symptoms in the
Wellcome Archive contains the comment that theory was “no help,” in other
words there was no theory to explain the symptoms, and he set out to dis-
cover it through his clinical work.104
* * *
Winnicott ran two open clinics for mothers and children in Hackney and
Paddington Green from 1923. Paddington Green clinic continued for 40 years
after his appointment as physician for children’s medicine, and gained
worldwide recognition after the second world war. Like Hackney Children’s
Hospital, Paddington Green owed its origins to a dispensary funded by
Victorian philanthropy, and continued to be funded by gifts until incorpo-
rated into the National Health Service as part of Queen Mary’s Hospital in
1948. In 1920 it had about 40 beds, 20 or so in the late 1930s. From 1923
until 1939 when the illness declined, it held a clinic for heart disease and
rheumatism.105 Winnicott’s case notes tell us little about the working lives of
his patients, but the occupation of most mothers in Paddington, Marylebone,
and Queens Park was domestic service, they were wives of transport and cas-
ual workers who lived in the “poor class dwellings” and overcrowded “slums”
in the streets and rows roundabout the hospital, which had high death and
infant mortality rates in the 1920s and 1930s, but not high birthrates.106 After
World War II, the social composition of this district changed, with immigra-
tion from the former colonies moving into Notting Hill, north of Ladbroke
Grove and round the Harrow Road.
Winnicott had learned the value of thorough case notes from one of his
teachers at Barts, Lord Horder. He took detailed histories of the child’s illness
from the mother (or sometimes the father), before turning his attention to the
child.107 Doctors should listen carefully to mothers, he recommended, because
through the “anxieties and guilt-laden volubility” there would eventually
emerge “details of the child’s infancy and early years in proper sequence and in
a way that has eventually made diagnosis as clear as daylight.”108 Diagnosis, he
discovered in the beginning of his work in pediatrics, was the difficult issue.
Young, ambitious, newly trained physicians, whose years in teaching hos-
pitals had made them used to treating actual diseases, were dismayed by the
number of patients encountered in hospital or GP clinics with diverse symp-
toms—catarrh, projectile vomiting, convulsions, for example—but “nothing
really wrong with them,” as Winnicott described in his first book on childhood
illness, Clinical Notes on the Disorders of Childhood (1931).109 Bed-wetting, growing
pains, pains in the abdomen, stuttering, and exhaustion were common enough
but rarely were they the result simply of physical illness; rather their cause lay
in the interaction of physical and emotional factors, the “difficulties of emo-
tional development,” which are so much easier to handle when the patient is
young and “the whole history of the case can be known.”110 Physical examina-
tions were necessary for the diagnosis of heart disease, typhoid, pneumonia; in
chorea, for instance, the child was watched crawling or walking naked round
the room. Some illnesses—rheumatic fever, asthma, or “pre-tubercular”—were
known by child doctors and psychiatrists to have a psychosomatic element. But
Winnicott’s detailed history-taking disclosed emotional distress, anxiety, fears,
which sprang from real situations behind the symptoms.
History-taking—family stories might be another name for them—told
of loss or separation, of a mother’s new pregnancy, the birth of a sibling,
events that often precipitated headaches, swollen limbs, pounding hearts, or
a terror of being alone. These were manifestations of depression or anxiety,
Winnicott suggested, and not (necessarily) physical disease. The proximity of
organic to emotional well-being is given literal expression in his first book as
164 Sally Alexander
he unraveled physical disease and symptoms: “The heart reflects every mood,
every thought” he writes, “even the memory of exercise can increase its rate
half as much again.”111( He had just raced a five-year-old with a weak heart up
several flights of stairs. The child’s heart was pounding but he was fine, while
Winnicott was in a state of collapse). Five years later, Winnicott described
a spectrum of appetite disorders, from the feeding difficulties of infants,
through anorexia nervosa of adolescents, to “melancholia, drug addiction,
hypochondria, and suicide,” which demonstrated the ways in which appe-
tite and digestive process became “involved in defence against anxiety and
depression,” and revealed the infant’s complex mental structure from the first
months of life, the three-way operations of fantasy, which linked oral fantasy
to the inside and outside of the body, his own and his mother’s.112
The standard treatment for restless, feverish children in the 1920s and
1930s was bed-rest for weeks at a time.113 Winnicott risked getting them up,
sending them home, keeping a “watching brief” over their symptoms and
letting them recover in time. Playing with the child, listening to her stories
and dreams, enabled him to decipher the meaning of her symptoms, or what
one 13-year-old called her “dreadful dreads.”114 He usually saw the child once
a week for a few weeks, or once a month, or less. Occasionally he referred a
child to his private consulting room. Mothers and children often returned
to see him in the clinic long after their first encounter. Much of the doctor’s
work in this context, he noted, was “probably a specialised form of friend-
ship” (friendship and social life were alternatives to analysis he believed).115
Winnicott’s case notes enter the emotional worlds of his patients, and he is
precise about the clinical setting.
The Paddington Green consulting room was large. Mothers and children
waited in the passage outside (there was always a long queue) while those who
arrived first sat around the room.116 Sometimes he invited a colleague or stu-
dent in to watch, but he was strict about their silence.117 Chairs and table were
placed so that he could see the length of the room and watch parent and child
enter and move toward him.118 Before they reached him he had made contact
with them by his facial expression and had time to “remember the case if it
is not a new patient.” Mother and child sat opposite him, the table between
them, so that he was facing them and they were close enough to touch.
On the table he kept a bowl filled with sterilized spatulas: shiny metal
instruments which would attract the child’s attention. Winnicott also used a
box of toys (like Melanie Klein), and pencil and paper as part of the consulta-
tion. He invited the child to play and draw, sometimes joining it on the floor.
He describes children’s play with the spatula. An infant hesitates, mouths the
spatula, throws it down, retrieves it, offers it to the mother then to Winnicott.
Another child shows off and seduces the audience by banging the spatula on
the bowl and table. “He’s the village blacksmith” a mother from across the
room calls out. The “taking and the dropping,” comments Winnicott, who
notes the infant’s every facial expression and bodily movement, “is a film-strip
of the little bit of his inner world that is related to me and his mother at that
time, and from this there can be guessed a good deal about his inner world
experiences at other times and in relation to other people and things.”119
Play with the spatula showed Winnicott how and with what feelings the
infant mastered (or not) its appetites or instincts, at what point anxiety or
inhibition interrupted infant satisfaction, whether and how the mother
responded. Winnicott watched mothers closely too: holding, letting go, all
the while commenting on her child and his history, which led him to com-
prehend how, through touch, gesture, and look—through play—mother and
child moved beyond the satisfaction (or not) of needs, into another level of
relating. He learnt from doing. In an early case note, Winnicott records watch-
ing the mother of a restless six-month-old infant hush the child, comfort, and
hold him. He then took the child into his arms and held him as he had seen
the mother do.120 His use of touch and imitation of the mother earned him
criticism; but he might have replied that this learning from others, develop-
ing a practice by watching and thinking and doing in a disciplined setting
was creative—indeed life itself:
For instance, one is at a music-hall and on to the stage come the dancers,
trained to liveliness. One can say that here is the primal scene, here is
exhibitionism, here is anal control, here is masochistic submission to dis-
cipline, here is a defiance of the super-ego. Sooner or later one adds: here is
LIFE. Might it not be that the main point of the performance is a denial of
deadness, a defence against depressive “death inside” ideas, the sexualisa-
tion being secondary.121
* * *
This chapter has tried to place Winnicott in his time: first, among liberal
advocates of welfare provision working in the shadow of world war; second,
in the eclectic Institute of Psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s as it estab-
lished a new profession; and finally, in the open clinic of Paddington Green
Hospital where, in conversation and play with his patients, he deciphered
the perils of unconscious mental life in bodily feeling and fantasies through
which the infant negotiated the everyday “crises” of life. In this clinical set-
ting, unique in the practice of psychoanalysis in Britain, Winnicott’s methods
were history-taking and the diagnosis of symptom using play, fantasy, and
dream associations. There is no space here to recount the development of his
method through therapeutic consultation, the “squiggle game” (drawing with
children), or therapeutic regression (in the discipline of the full analysis); only
to note that primary maternal preoccupation—the “two-body relationship”
essential for the development of the inner world of the infant—had its original
“setting” in Paddington Green and derived particular qualities from that expe-
rience. There Winnicott encountered the clamor of need from the queues of
mothers and children along the hospital corridor whose promiscuous range of
symptoms, when described in their own words in their own time, exposed the
visceral links between imagination and desire in relationship with others. There
he learned to work with the discipline of time (an hour for therapeutic consul-
tation and letting the child recover in its own time), to relinquish the desire
to rush to interpretation, and while his voice always remained in control, his
166 Sally Alexander
case notes and papers incorporated the words and gestures of the mothers and
children he treated. Small and slight, like the children he met, his mind was
restless and creative like theirs. Democratic conversations in a particular set-
ting, between a doctor whose objectivity, reliability, and professional training
should act as a sort of bond of trust between him and his patient (empathy was
never enough) were the well-springs of a psychoanalytic practice still found
useful today.122
Mothers and children were emblematic figures throughout British culture
and politics in the first half of the twentieth century.123 No one gave the mother
as much psychic power as Winnicott. The father, he wrote, “takes over feelings
that the infant has already had towards certain properties of mother,” and the
mother’s holding and adapting to the infant’s need became a metaphor for the
work of the psychoanalyst. “The mental health of the individual is laid down
by the mother” is one of his more uncompromising statements of maternal
responsibility “who, because she is devoted to her infant, is able to make active
adaptation,” he added.124 His perspective here was the child’s, but, as we have
seen, he also paid close attention to the mother’s needs and feelings.
Feminists also focused on the maternal body during the 1920s and 1930s
when they opened birth control and mother-and-child clinics welcoming
working-class women. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Save the Mothers was a plea for mater-
nal medical care, while Marie Stopes’s Mother England was (among other things)
a collective autobiography of women’s reproductive health.125 Feminist fiction
and journalism described the ravages of pregnancy, childbirth, and malnutri-
tion on the woman’s body. Medical provision, maternity benefits, birth con-
trol, and family allowances were argued for as universal rights for women.
Inequalities of sexual difference have been since at least the 1790s the nerve
of feminist politics. Winnicott did not question sexual difference; rather, he
grounded it in the body and unconscious fantasy, which nascent feminists in
the 1960s read as a sort of straitjacket. Ursula Bowlby was often seen, her sister
remembered, running from the room, her children chasing her, book under her
arm, longing to “get away from them.”126 During the 1950s and 1960s while
Winnicott increasingly used political events—the war aims, Berlin Wall, land-
ing on the moon—as metaphors for mental states, fear of woman, its source
in the unconscious debt every sane human being owes to his or her mother,
is a compound force of feeling. Mussolini’s dictatorship was built on that fear.
Freud in a last essay wrote that fear of femininity is the most recalcitrant resist-
ance; for Winnicott the fear is not of the feminine, but of “the woman figure of
primitive unconscious fantasy (who) has no limits to her existence or power.”127
Unconscious mental life it seems begins and ends with woman.
Winnicott’s ideas about mother and child, their needs and rights as indi-
viduals, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s can be read as part of a structure of
feeling, Virginia Woolf’s “thinking in common”—tolerant and democratic—
that enabled the establishment of the welfare state, with all its limitations. His
case notes and essays, run through with the vernacular, reveal a new relation-
ship of difference emerging in the 1960s: the “very black African” who got a
16-year-old pregnant, the black child of the mother’s imagination, the envy
of the breast-fed children of black mothers.128 Here Winnicott, evoking a new

social presence signaled by skin color and freighted with the erotic, exposed,
perhaps unconsciously, some future limits of liberal social democracy.
Notes
Thanks to Catherine Hall, Ursula Owen, and Barbara Taylor for thoughtful comments;
Couze Venn for a copy of Collected Papers; Jonathan Sklar for reminding me of the value of
Winnicott’s letters. Versions of this chapter were given at the St. John’s College Research
Centre interdisciplinary seminar, History of Science seminar, CRASSH, Cambridge and
the Tavistock Institute MA in Psychoanalytic Studies; my thanks for the excellent ques-
tions and comments. Research into the Donald Woods Winnicott Papers at the Oskar
Diethelm Library, The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Centre, was undertaken while
on AHRC-funded research leave in summer 2008.
Harry Karnac’s excellent bibliography of D. W. Winnicott’s publications appears in,
D. W. Winnicott, Thinking about Children, Ray Shepherd, Jennifer Johns, and Helen Taylor
Robinson, eds. (Cambridge, MA: A Meloyd Lawrence Book, Da Capo Press, 1996), 291–328;
also F. Rodman, Winnicott, Life and Work (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 419–438.
1. In Clare Winnicott and others, eds., Home is Where We Start From, Essays by a
Psychoanalyst (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 123.
2. Peter Barham, personal communication. Barham, in his Forgotten Lunatics of the Great
War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), discusses Winnicott’s
democratic psychology (161–164).
3. Daniel Pick, “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture,” in David Feldman and
Jon Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 210–236.
4. D. W. Winnicott, Human Nature (London: Free Associations, 1988), 60.
5. D. W. Winnicott, “Psychoanalysis and Science, Friends or Relations” (1961), Home, 16,
for the infant as creator. See ibid., 101–106, for medical support.
6. For different psychological states of mind, see D. W. Winnicott, “Primary Maternal
Identification” (1956), Collected Papers, through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1956), 301. For nursery rhymes, see “Hate in the
Counter-Transference” (1947), Collected Papers, 202.
7. Winnicott, Human Nature, 102–104, 157.
8. For the inner world, see D. W. Winnicott, “Appetite and Emotional Disorder” (1936),
Collected Papers, through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock Publications,
1958), 35.
9. PP/DWW/A/M/3, handwritten memo “what is worthwhile in medicine,” n.d. but late
1920s—early 1930s, Wellcome Library Archive.
10. Winnicott, “The Concept of the Healthy Individual” (1967), Home, 38; “Some Thoughts
on the Meaning of the Word Democracy” (1950), Home, 242.
11. PP/DWW/A/M/2, handwritten notes, Infant Observation, (n.d.), Wellcome Library
Archive
12. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown” (n.d. c. 1963), in Clare Winnicott and others, eds.,
Psychological Explorations (London, Karnac Books, 1989), 93.
13. Mother and infant centers and clinics increased in the 1920s following the passing of
the 1918 Maternal and Child Welfare Act, argued for in Parliament on the grounds of
mothers’ ignorance (Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, Child and Maternal Welfare
in England, 1900–1939 [London: Croom Helm, 1980], 104–105). Deborah Cohen,
“Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the Mothers’ Clinics and the Practice of
Contraception,” History Workshop Journal issue 35 (Spring 1993), 95–116, describes the
gap between the practice of the mothers’ clinics and Stopes’ eugenic beliefs. Throughout
the 1920s and 1930s the future of health services, the role of consultants and GPs
(many surgeries were run from front rooms) in voluntary and Poor Law hospitals
168 Sally Alexander
were debated among government and medics. The hated Poor Law was inefficient and
doomed following universal suffrage. Winnicott’s Hackney and Paddington Green
Clinics for mothers and children were roughly in line with the Dawson report’s (1920)
influential but never implemented rethinking of the provision and philosophy of
health services, through polyclinics, to be run by GPs in alliance with hospitals (Brian
Abel-Smith, The Hospitals 1800–1948, A Study in Social Administration in England and
Wales [London: Heinemann, 1964], chapter 22). For an experiment in health care, see
Jane Lewis and Barbara Brookes, “The Peckham Health Centre, ‘PEP,’ and the Concept
of General Practice during the 1930s and 1940s,” Medical History 27 (1983), 151–161.
14. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951), Collected Papers,
229–242.
15. Adam Phillips, Winnicott (London: Fontana Press, 1986), 140. Phillips is an indispensable
guide to Winnicott. Winnicott’s case notes in the Wellcome Archives are not open access.
However, early typed and written papers, with notes amended, can be read. His pub-
lished papers are full of case notes, abbreviated, simplified, as he describes in Therapeutic
Consultations in Child Psychiatry (1971) (London: Karnac Books, 1996 edn.), 3.
16. Ian Patterson put this more elegantly in a Cambridge seminar (November 2011).
17. Clare Winnicott, “D.W.W. A Reflection” (1978), C. Winnicott ed., Psychoanalytic
Explorations, 4. Brett Kahr names his Leys school classmates killed in 1914–18
(D.W.Winnicott, A Biographical Portrait [London: Karnac Books, 1996], 139–140).
18. For Winnicott’s refusal of Freud’s death instinct, see, e.g., Human Nature, 132–134. For
his disagreement with Klein, see below. R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian
Thought, (London, Free Association Books, 1991), 266–70 for Klein’s death instinct.
19. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” Psychological Explorations, 89.
20. “What About Father?” (1944), D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside
World (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 116–117.
21. F. Robert Rodman, Winnicott, Life and Work (Cambridge MA: Da Capo, 2003), chapter
22; Winnicott referred to this case in “Fear of Breakdown” (1963), Psychoanalytic
Explorations, 93.
22. Clare Winnicott, “D.W. W.: A Reflection,” Psychoanalytic Explorations, 2. His first coro-
nary was in early 1948 (Rodman, Winnicott, 151).
23. Winnicott, “The Pill and the Moon” (1969), Home, 196, 206; “Adolescent Immaturity”
(1968), Home, 157–159.
24. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul, A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), chapter 10, emphasizes the 1940s for the “common soil” of
Beveridge and object relations, and hence the context of Winnicott’s work; this chapter
places his foundational work in the interwar years.
25. Peter Hennessy, Never Again, Britain 1945–1951 (London: Vintage, 1993); S. Alexander,
“A New Civilization, London Surveyed,” History Workshop Journal issue 64 (Autumn
2007), 297–320.
26. Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties, An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010), chapter 9;
Brookes and Lewis, “The Peckham Health Centre.”
27. Richard Overy, The Morbid Age, Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919–1939 (London:
Penguin Books, 2010), chapters 3 and 4. Gardiner, Thirties, chapters 3, 5, and 6.
28. Brett Kahr, D. W. Winnicott, A Biographical Portrait (London: Karnac Books, 1996), 68;
Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, “Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole,” OUP
uncorrected proofs, sent by author, 2011.
29. Winnicott, Human Nature, 57, for memories and fantasies of instinctual experiences;
100, for memories enabling the first feed; 148–9, for rejection of racial memory.
“Discussion of War Aims” (1940), Home, 213, for likeness to enemies; “Some Thoughts
on the Meaning of the Word Democracy” (1950), Home, 241–251, for unconscious feel-
ing and the secret ballot.
30. Rodman, Winnicott, chapter 10. See also Craig Fees, “A Fearless Frankness”: www
.childrenwebmag.com/articles/child-care-history/a-fearless-frankness (accessed January
2012).
31. Winnicott, “Physical Therapy of Mental Disorders: ch. 63 Convulsion Therapy; ch. 64
Leucotomy” (1943–1956) Psychoanalytic Explorations, 516, 517, 539.
32. Winnicott, Letter to John Bowlby, May 11, 1954, ed. F. Robert Rodman, Spontaneous
Gesture, Selected Letters of D.W.Winnicott (London: Karnac Books, 1999), 65–66.
33. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World, 30.
34. Elizabeth Wilson, Halfway to Paradise, Women in Postwar Britain, 1945–1968 (London:
Tavistock Publications, 1980), 118; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery, Theories of the Child
and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), chapters 4 and 5; Anna Davin, “Imperialism and
Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal issue 5 (Spring 1978), 9–65.
35. Kate Bolick, “Why women like me will never marry,” The Observer, January 2012, for
recent reflections on these themes.
36. Winnicott, “This Feminism” (1964), Home, 188. The first five demands of the 1970s
Women’s Liberation Movement signified a feminist critique of the welfare state.
37. Alice Rowley, seminar, Goldsmiths UL, spring 1999.
38. Janet Sayers, Mothering Psychoanalysis, Helen Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud and
Melanie Klein (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 11. Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two, The
Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago Press, 1995), develops maternal
ambivalence as a process of growth and change in mothers.
39. H. A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1989, vol. 2, 1911–1933 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 557–565. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and
Gender Politics, Women and the Rise of European Welfare States 1880s—1950s (Abingdon
and New York: Routledge, 1991).
40. William Beveridge, Power and Influence, An Autobiography (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1953), 344; J. M. Keynes, “Am I a Liberal?” (1925), John Maynard Keynes,
Collected Writings, vol. 1X (London, 1972).
41. Winnicott, Letter to Lord Beveridge, October 15, 1946, The Spontaneous Gesture, 8.
42. “Adolescent Immaturity” (1968), Home, 153. See also ‘human nature, called collectively
the social structure,’ “Discussion of War Aims” (1940), Home, 212.
43. Kahr, D.W. Winnicott, 97 for the extent of his administrative responsibilities.
44. S. Alexander, “A New Civilisation?” History Workshop Journal issue 64, (2007), 319–320.
45. “Thinking and the Unconscious” (1945), Home, 170.
46. Winnicott, “Primary Maternal Preoccupation” (1956), Collected Papers, 305. “Some
Thoughts on the Meaning of Democracy” (1950), Home, 256 for the ideal of world
citizenship.
47. D. W. Winnicott, Clinical Notes on the Disorders of Childhood (London: Heinemann,
1931), 127.
48. C. Winnicott, quoting from his notebook, “D.W.W.: A Reflection,” Pychological
Explorations, 8, and for biographical details that follow.
49. By permission of The Marsh Agency Ltd on behalf of The Winnicott Trust.
50. Rodman, Winnicott, 370, describes the sisters in old age.
51. The Winnicotts kept no male servants, because, psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft told
Brett Kahr, they were not high gentry: Kahr, Winnicott, 6.
52. Winnicott’s use of adaptation, instinct, species difference, his belief in objectivity he
took from Darwin. See his strong objection to John Bowlby’s application of ethology to
human nature: “Discussion of Grief and Mourning in Infancy” (1953), Psychoanalytic
Explorations, 429.
53. Rodman, Winnicott, chapters 4 and 7.
54. C. Winnicott, “D.W.W.: A Reflection,” quoting from Winnicott’s notebook, Psychological
Explorations, 16, 8.
55. ms notes PP/DWW/A/M/3, Wellcome Library Archive.
56. Winnicott, “Psychoanalysis and Science; Friends or Relations?” (1961), Home, 13–18.
57. Rodman, Winnicott, 40; Winnicott failed his second surgery exam in gynecology three
times.
58. Winnicott, Human Nature, 2.
59. Clare Winnicott, “D.W.W.: A Reflection,” Psychological Explorations, 17.
170 Sally Alexander
60. Letter to Violet, November 1919; Rodman, The Spontaneous Gesture, 23; psychoanaly-
sis might bring religious fanatics to sense of true religion he added. “Classification:
Is There a Psycho-analytic Contribution to Psychiatric Classification” (1959–1964),
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, Studies in the Theory of Emotional
Development (1965) (London: Karnac Books, 1990 edn.), 124–129, gives a brief history
of psychoanalysis and a tribute to Freud.
61. Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” Collected Papers, 199.
62. Barbara Caine, “The Stracheys as Translators,” History Workshop Journal issue 45 (Spring
1998), 145–170.
63. The British Medical Association recognized psychoanalysis in 1928 (Winnicott, “Ernest
Jones, Obituary” [1958], Psychological Explorations, 397). Freud describes London’s train-
ing center, S. Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis, Conversations with an Impartial
Person” (1926), James Strachey and others eds., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX (1925–1926 ) (hereafter SE ), 228.
64. Winnicott attributed his emphasis on process rather than interpretation to Strachey’s
influence (“James Strachey, Obituary” [1960], Psychological Explorations, 506–510).
65. Freud, “Lay Analysis,” (1926) SE, vol. XX, (1925–1926), 179–258.
66. Perry Meisel and Walter Kenrick, eds., Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alex
Strachey 1924–1925 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986). Alix is one of Laura Marcus’s
“European Witnesses” in this volume (chapter 5).
67. Barbara Caine’s Bombay to Bloomsbury, a Biography of the Strachey family (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 174–180, describes the Strachey marriage.
68. Winnicott, “The Concept of the Healthy Individual,” Home, 26.
69. Winnicott, “Living Creatively” (1970), Home, 44–48. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher,
using oral and documentary sources, confirm the difficulties of sex in marriage in
their Sex before the Sexual Revolution, Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge;
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
70. “D.W.W. on D.W.W.,” Psychological Explorations, 576.
71. “Perversion and Pregenital Fantasy,” handwritten notes, 1963, PP/DWW/A/M/2,
Wellcome Library Archive, edited in Psychological Explorations, 79–80. See also PP/
DWW/A/M/3, an early manuscript reflecting on the doctor’s calling, science, mid-
wifery, and so on, which describes the “deformed and curious creations . . . only fit for
museums . . . or Barnham shows,” which the midwife brings to life.
72. Winnicott’s account of this is in “On the Kleinian Contribution” (1962), Maturational
Processes, 173 and throughout. Klein seldom mentioned him in her published work.
73. J. Sayers, Mothering Psychoanalysis, 223–224.
74. Winnicott, “The Depressive Position in Normal Psychical Development” (1954–55),
Collected Papers, 262.
75. Later correspondence between Winnicott and Riviere was often prickly, see for exam-
ple, from Joan Riviere, 12 June 1958, 1957/8, Box1/11, The Donald Woods Winnicott
Papers, Oscar Diethelm Library, The New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center. See
also, Joan Riviere, The Inner World and Joan Riviere, Collected Papers 1920–1958, (London:
H. Karnac Books, 1991) ed. Athol Hughes.
76. In 1921 Barbara Low translated Hermine Hug-Helmuth’s pioneering book on child
analysis (Lucy Scholes, “Hermine Hug-Helmuth: Pioneering the childhood (sibling)
experience, 1913–1924,” UCL MA dissertation, 2010). Searl and Isaacs were trainees
with Winnicott in 1927. Early women psychoanalysts came from war work, teaching,
and suffrage; see S. Alexander, “Pyschoanalysis in Britain in the Early 20thc,” History
Workshop Journal, issue 45 (Spring 1998), 135–144.
77. Ernest Jones founded the London and the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. He
closed the London Institute in 1919 because of its eclecticism (Brenda Maddox, Freud’s
Wizard, the Enigma of Ernest Jones [London: John Murray, 2006], 147). See also Ernest
Jones, Free Associations, Memories of a Psychoanalyst (London: Hogarth Press, 1959) 239,
259; Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair, A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000),
chapter 4 for the Medico-Psychological Clinic.
78. Freud, “Lay Analysis,” SE, vol. XX, 228.
79. Maddox, Freud’s Wizard, 219. Resistance to an influx of Jewish psychoanalysts compet-
ing for small numbers of patients makes painful reading.
80. Danto, Freuds Free Clinics, 17. Free clinics opened in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, New
York, and in 1926 in Gloucester Place, London. The Medico-Psychological Clinic in
London had opened its doors to those of small means during World War I.
81. Jones, Free Associations, 159–160.
82. Maddox, Freud’s Wizard, 41–60.
83. J. B. Hobman, ed., David Eder, Memoir of a Modern Pioneer (London: Victor Gollancz,
1954), 9. Eder “ran a queer little practice in Soho among Italian waiters” (E. Jones, Free
Associations, 137). Mathew Thomson, “‘The Solution to his Own Enigma’: Connecting
the Life of Montague David Eder (1865–1936), Socialist, Psychoanalyst, Zionist and
Modern Saint,” Medical History 55 (2011), 61–84.
84. Reports May and June 1919, Ernest Jones Papers, Institute of Psychoanalysis Library. Phyllis
Grosskurth, Melanie Klein, Her World and Her Work (London: Marefield Press, 1985), 159.
85. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” SE, vol. XV111 (1920–1922), 7–64.
86. “D.W.W. on D.W.W.,” Psychological Explorations, 567. The Freud-Klein Controversies
1941–45, Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds. (London: Routledge with the Institute
of Psychoanalysis, 1991).
87. P. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein (London: Hodder, 1986), part III, chapters 1 and 2.
Grosskurth gives a lucid account of the division of European Societies over child analy-
sis (163); she emphasizes aggression, anxiety, and sexual difference in Klein’s account
of the child, and attributes Anna Freud’s emphasis on child analysis as educational,
while her belief in the weakness of the ego and superego and her caution in releasing
too much unconscious pain in the child was due to her own experience of analysis by
her own father (163–169). Elisabeth Young Breuhl, Anna Freud, A Biography (London:
Macmillan, 1988), chapter 6 (“Another Life”), attributes Anna’s careful approach to the
child’s unconscious to her work as a teacher in the 1920s, her working relationship with
Dorothy Burlington and her work with the Hampstead War Nurseries. For Anna’s own
assessment of her methods compared with Klein and Freudians, see ibid., 179–180.
88. Paul Roazen, Oedipus in Britain, Edward Glover and the Struggle over Klein (New York:
Other Press, 2000), 64–65.
89. Winnicott, Letter to Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, June 3, 1954, Rodman ed.,
Spontaneous Gesture, 71–75.
90. Gregorio Kohon, ed., The British School of Psychoanalysis, The Independent Tradition,
(London, Free Association Books, 1986), 20–21, for useful definition of object rela-
tions. See also Eric Raynor, The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (London: Free
Association Books, 1990), 22–25.
91. Letter to Melanie Klein, November 17, 1952, Rodman, ed., Spontaneous Gesture, 37.
92. Letter to Joan Riviere, February 3, 1956, Rodman, ed., Spontaneous Gesture, 94–97.
93. Letter to Adam Limentani, September 27, 1968, Rodman, ed., Spontaneous Gesture, 178–180.
94. Winnicott, “Manic Defence” (1935), Collected Papers, 130.
95. Winnicott, “Melanie Klein: On Her Concept of Envy; Review of Envy and Gratitude”
(1959), Psychological Explorations, 444. See also, “The Depressive Position in Normal
Emotional Development” (1954–55), Collected Papers, 262–277.
96. “Postscript: D.W.W. on D.W.W.,” Psychological Explorations, 576.
97. Winnicott, “Birth Memories, Birth Trauma and Anxiety” (1949), Collected Papers, 177,
for a list of environmental factors.
98. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” (1968), Playing
and Reality, 101–111, distinguishes between relating to and using an object.
99. Winnicott, “Appetite and Emotional Disorder” (1936), Collected Papers, 34.
100. Winnicott, Human Nature, 52, and 92 for different kinds of fantasy.
101. Winnicott, “The Mother’s Contribution to Society” (1957), Home, 124.
102. Billy Piper, the actress, asked what love felt like, replied “Good hate.” Guardian Weekend,
November 19, 2011, 10.
103. Winnicott, “Hate in the Countertransference” (1947), Collected Papers, 198–201.
104. Winnicott Papers, Wellcome, PP/DWW/, n.d.
172 Sally Alexander
105. A History of the County of Middlesex: volume 9: Hampstead, Paddington (1989), 246–252:
http:///www.british-history.ac.uk (accessed June 2010).
106. The New Survey of London Life and Labour, vol. V1, Survey of Social Conditions, (2) The
Western Area (text), (1936; London: P.S. King and Son, Ltd.), 431–432.
107. Winnicott, Clinical Notes, 12.
108. Master Copy 1930–39, No 5, “The Teacher, the Parent and the Doctor,” draft
type-script 4, n.d., 13, PP/DWW, Wellcome Library Archive.
109. Mss papers from the 1930s in the Wellcome Library Archive include the following
childhood disorders: mental defect, masturbation, micturation, nose and throat,
arthritis, convulsions and fits, nerves and anxiety, fidgitiness (sic), etc.
110. Winnicott, Clinical Notes, 3, “History Taking.”
111. Ibid., 70
112. Winnicott, “Appetite and Emotional Disorder” (1936), Collected Papers, 33–35.
113. Winnicott, Clinical Notes, 5, 109.
114. Ibid., 110. He “always avoided maladjusted children” in the clinic, they were too
disruptive. “D.W.W. on D.W.W.,” Psychoanalytical Explorations, 576.
115. Winnicott, Clinical Notes, 5, 100, 122, and runs through his writing. “Appetite and
Emotional Disorder” is a brilliant statement of this approach (1936), Collected Papers,
33–51.
116. Winnicott, Therapeutic Consultations, 2.
117. P. M. Tizard in 1949 (Rodman, Winnicott, 387). See also Winnicott, “The Observation
of Infants in a Set Situation” (1941), Collected Papers, 52–69.
118. Estelle Maud Cole’s first point was watch the patient walk in (“A Few “Don’ts for
Beginners in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis” [1922] International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 3, 43–44). Whether the child walks or is dragged, whether he romps or
lies on a couch, the physician learns much (Winnicott, Clinical Notes, 25).
119. “Appetite and Emotional Disorder” (1936), Winnicott, Collected Papers, 46–47.
120. Irma Pick, the psychoanalyst, told me of child observation with Winnicott in the
1950s, when he crooked his finger and offered it to the infant as if it were the breast.
September 2010.
121. Winnicott, “The Manic Defence” (1935), Collected Papers, 131.
122. Winnicott, “Cure” (1970), Home, 113–118.
123. Anne Middleton Wagner, Mother Stone, The vitality of Modern British Sculpture (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2005) is a rich history of early twentieth-century
carvings of mother and child.
124. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World, 114; “Birth Memories, Birth
Trauma and Anxiety” (1969), Collected Papers, 189.
125. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Save the Mothers (London: A.A.Knopf, 1930); Marie Stopes, Mother
England (London: J.Bale, 1929).
126. Kath Holden, “The Long Hand of the Nanny,” Unpublished paper, 2011.
127. Winnicott, “The Meaning of the Word Democracy,” Home, 252–253.
128. Winnicott, “The Pill and the Moon” (1969), Home, 198–202.
8
Freud’s Stepchild: Adolescent
Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis
Pamela Thurschwell
The phrase in my title, “Freud’s stepchild,” comes from Anna Freud’s 1957
article “Adolescence” in which she surveys the scanty psychoanalytic writ-
ings on adolescence since her father’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905). Anna Freud quotes Ernest Jones’s 1922 article “Some Problems in
Adolescence,” which came to the uninspiring conclusion that “the precise way
in which a given person will pass through the necessary stages of development
in adolescence is to a very great extent determined by the form of his infantile
development.”1 Freud uses Jones to argue that most psychoanalysts writing
about adolescence have slavishly followed her father who asserted in his Three
Essays that what happens in adolescence is almost entirely a repetition of the
infantile Oedipus crisis. Adolescence, Anna Freud claims, remains a “stepchild”
in psychoanalytic theory in 1957.2 Of course “stepchild” is a loaded term in
the overwrought, familial context of psychoanalysis. If adolescence—which
one might identify with Anna, who is interested in it, who sees adolescent
patients—is a stepchild in psychoanalysis, what does that make her, the appar-
ently dutiful daughter? Is there a complaint about a lack of status lodged in
that word? Can you be both a stepchild and a rightful heir?3 Or are there ways,
perhaps, in which adolescence might benefit from being a “stepchild,” within
the complex institutional politics of early twentieth-century psychoanalysis?
Does being a stepchild give one perhaps more room for maneuver, rebellion,
disobedience? (Consider the fairy-tale world of evil stepparents who are even-
tually vanquished by a series of triumphant stepchildren.) Might a stepchild
also dislodge expected teleologies of progress, reproduction, or inheritance?
As we know, when he adopted the Oedipus myth as a universal model,
Sigmund Freud controversially insisted upon the existence of infantile sexual-
ity, but he also proclaimed the inevitability of the child’s (specifically the son’s)
rebellion against the father, and the consequent rupture with the past. The
173
174 Pamela Thurschwell
Oedipal story is one about the desire for change: we grow up, break from our
parents, escape the all-absorbing family—but also about the inevitability of
repetition: we become our parents all over again to a new rebellious order, our
children. In the Oedipal scenario, rupture is vital to the forward march of civi-
lization, even as repetition assures continuity with the past. Perhaps thinking
through and with psychoanalysis’s excluded middle, the “stepchild,” adoles-
cence, might reveal historical alternatives to Freud’s compelling developmental
bildungsroman.
This chapter sets out to do three things. First, I will consider Anna Freud’s
claim that Freudian psychoanalysis neglects the rich psychic terrain of ado-
lescence. Second, I will compare Sigmund Freud’s lack of interest in the topic
to the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s fascination with adolescence
through the lens of Hall’s short article “A Medium in the Bud” (1918) about
an adolescent girl spiritualist medium, who was seen by Freud and Jung on
Freud’s one and only trip to America to Clark University in 1909. Hall’s mag-
num opus, Adolescence (1904), was written before this incident took place,
but the short article continues his interest in many strands of his great
theme. Third, I will suggest that by reading this apparently anecdotal article
we can see the ways in which Hall’s understanding of the adolescent posi-
tions itself both with and against Freud’s, and we can begin to understand
how Hall’s commitment to recapitulationist evolutionary theory and its odd
theories of temporality contribute to the adolescent’s emergence in early
twentieth-century culture as a site for untimely fantasies of escape from the
potentially constricting progressive developmental narratives of modernity.
Unlike adolescence, childhood has always held a doubly privileged place in
the history of the psychoanalytic movement. We can see this duality at work
in the foreword Sigmund Freud wrote to August Aichhorn’s Wayward Youth of
1925. Freud writes:
The child had become the main object of psychoanalytic research and in
this respect has replaced the neurotic with whom the work began. Analysis
has revealed that the child lives on almost unchanged in the sick patient as
well as in the dreamer and the artist; it has thrown a flood of light on the
instinctual forces and impulses which give the childish being its charac-
teristic features; and it has traced the paths of development which proceed
to maturity.4
Notice the slide from child as analysand (replacing the neurotic) to the child
as the object recovered by analysis (that which lives on unchanged in the
adult). On the one hand, the child becomes increasingly important as patient
(The problem of child analysis was brought to the fore in the heated debates
between the followers of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein over the question
of whether it was possible to analyze a child as one would an adult.) On the
other hand, as Freud goes on to state, perhaps more significantly, childhood
is what persists “almost unchanged” in the sick patient, the dreamer, the art-
ist, to some extent, in us all. Is childhood, then, that which psychoanalysis
Freud’s Stepchild 175
wishes to bring to the surface (the crucial place of infancy and childhood
as an origin, as an object to be retrieved or constructed)? Or is the child the
subject to be examined, understood, and led down a developmental path
toward maturity? Can “the child” comfortably fulfil both of these roles? It is
possible that the existence of the adolescent, uncertainly positioned between
childhood and adulthood, might bring out some of the difficulties inherent
in this double imperative. It is at least clear that whereas from its earliest days
psychoanalysis deliberated and debated childhood, from “Little Hans” to the
Controversial Discussions and beyond, it left the adolescent comparatively
alone.5
It may appear obvious why psychoanalysis would choose the child rather
than the adolescent as its prime object in its complex but determined ques-
tioning of, but also quest for, originating causes. The further back in time,
the more formative, the argument usually goes. Adolescence occupies the
awkward middle ground between the adult who comes to the analyst seeking
a cure, and the childhood and infancy where pathology and personality are
both imagined to begin.
If adolescence is undertheorized in psychoanalysis, however, it seems to
be overrepresented in terms of Freud’s case histories. Many of Freud’s crucial
early patients were in their late adolescence. “Dora” and “The Psychogenesis
of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” deal with 18-year-olds. Katharina
in Studies on Hysteria is around 18, and Breuer’s patient Anna O. was 21 when
her illness began.6 In practice, then, adolescents surround Freud and often
make his life more difficult. Two of his thorniest women patients (Dora and
the young woman in “A Case of Female Homosexuality”) are in their late
teens when they first see him. If they become embroiled in famous trans-
ference problems with Freud this may have as much to do with his trouble
with adolescence as with his more fully explored troubles with gender and
sexuality. Where would the theory of transference be without recalcitrant
teenage girls? If women provide resistance to psychoanalytic interpretation,
adolescents may do so as well.
Anna Freud recognizes that there is a central difficulty with adolescents
as psychoanalytic patients. Adolescent patients almost inevitably perform a
straightforward negative transference: “[W]hen the revolt against the parents
is anticipated in the transference,” she writes, it “tends to lead to a break with
the analyst, i.e., to abrupt and undesirable termination of treatment from the
patient’s side.”7 Usually the adolescent patient has not been party to the con-
tract that has sent them to the analysts’ office in the first place; why should
he or she comply? One significant contributor to this adolescent refusal to
fall in line, which is also at play in the debates over child analysis, is that the
adolescent rarely, if ever, pays for his or her own analysis. There is always a
third party in the transaction, usually a parent, who may want something
out of the psychoanalysis that the adolescent patient may not want for him
or herself.
If we pause briefly and consider two of Freud’s famous case histories,
“Dora,” and the young woman in “A Case of Female Homosexuality,” we
can witness the formative trouble with transference that emerges from the
treatment of adolescents. Both young women come to Freud reluctantly, and
both appear to have their own interpretations of the source of their distress,
interpretations that have been developed since via feminist and queer criti-
cism: it is not psychic illness that afflicts Dora, but rather social context that
positions her as an object of exchange between men. In “A Case of Female
Homosexuality,” it is not psychic illness but social context that bars a kind of
love that seems unproblematic in terms of the nameless young patient’s own
psychic make-up. Freud initially points out that the young woman in “A Case
of Female Homosexuality” in fact has no neurosis about her sexuality at all—
she seems perfectly happy with it, just unhappy that her father has rejected
her because of it. Dora prematurely terminated her analysis, much to Freud’s
famous chagrin, and subsequently, Freud, in what reads as a kind of “break
up with her before she breaks up with me” move, hastily ends the analysis
of the young woman in “A Case of Female Homosexuality,” recommending a
woman doctor because he believes that she will never develop a proper trans-
ference with him.8 In this case’s fascinating scene of countertransference,
Freud’s rejection of the adolescent mimics and preempts her rejection of him.
My brief analysis here cannot do justice to the intricacies of the two cases, but
it does, I hope, indicate some of the contours of Freud’s specific resistances
to adolescents who refuse to comply with psychoanalytic interpretation and
intervention
Freud addresses adolescence directly in the third section of The Three Essays
on Sexuality, “Transformations of Puberty,” however despite the existence of
this essay, his interest in puberty per se seems minimal.9 It is the shortest
of the three essays with subtitles such as “After-Effects of Infantile Object
Choice,” which seem to give the game away, that Freud’s real interest lies
elsewhere and that the transformations of puberty are primarily aftereffects;
reenactings of infantile scenes and desires, a half-hearted rerun of the origi-
nal Oedipus crisis, just as Anna Freud implies.
Of course Freud does assert that there are important developments in ado-
lescence, the central one being the installation of sexual difference. It is dur-
ing adolescence that the nature of libido in boys and girls starts to diverge.
According to Freud puberty works in exactly opposite ways for boys and girls.
In boys it brings about a “great accession” in libido, while for girls, conversely,
it is the time that libido becomes repressed. Freud’s diagramming of adoles-
cent sexuality equates feminine sexuality with passivity, and masculine sex-
uality with activity. Leaving behind active/masculine/clitoral sexuality the
little girl finds herself making the unrewarding trip toward passive/feminine/
vaginal adult sexuality. Adult femininity is premised in the essay on puberty,
on a renunciation of the active clitoris for the more passive vagina—what the
adolescent girl experiences is almost literally a retreat into the body.10
If this shift is the defining characteristic of Freudian adolescence for girls,
for boys the main event is the replaying of the Oedipal situation with a
stronger sense of the incest taboo. This eventually sends the boy away from
the loved mother and hated father, out into the world to find other objects of
desire. Adolescent boys, it seems, are compelled to exit the family, and this
exile eventually becomes the basis for what constitutes the central adolescent
achievement, rebellion against the old order:
At the same time as these plain incestuous phantasies are overcome and
repudiated, one of the most significant, but also one of the most painful,
psychical achievements of the pubertal period is completed: detachment
from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposi-
tion, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the
new generation and the old.11
An adolescent’s ability to detach from parental authority is here posited

as one of the main motors of the progress of civilization. If time moves for-
ward, if things change, it is because the new generation refuses entirely to
replicate the old. And this refusal becomes determinedly gender specific at
adolescence. As boys’ ties to the family are loosened (either by themselves,
their parents, “society,” or perhaps, evolutionary necessity), adolescent girls
are turning inward. These two journeys seem hopelessly at odds with each
other, one out of the family, the other, strangely, into the body. For Sigmund
Freud, what is specific to adolescence is, for boys, a cultural and psychic
achievement: the detachment from parental authority, the rebellion against
the past, which makes new and forward-looking stories possible. For girls,
the changes of adolescence are more strictly biological. At adolescence the
girl’s story becomes one that is wearily familiar to many feminist critiques of
Freud—the path that leads to the Freud of “anatomy is destiny.” From another
perspective we might see this as a problem of differently gendered narratives
of development: the adolescence posited by psychoanalysis does not initiate
narrative for the adolescent girl in the way it seems to for the boy; instead
adolescence for girls is anchored in the body; periodicity leads to a different
kind of static, or, at best, cyclical narrative for girls.
* * *
If Freud found adolescence theoretically uninteresting, and adolescents recalci-

trant as patients, his contemporary the pioneering experimental psychologist
G. Stanley Hall saw things quite differently. Arguably, Hall was the primary
architect of our image of the twentieth-century adolescent. During the lat-
ter years of the nineteenth century doctors, educators, psychologists, sociolo-
gists, ethnologists, and social reformers adopted evolutionary ideas of organic
development to begin to formulate the specific characteristics of the epoch
between childhood and adulthood. Contemporary debates over coeducation
and juvenile delinquency, as well as Hall’s own championing of the statistical
and experientially based Child Study movement of the 1890s,12 fed into his
1904 magnum opus Adolescence, which is often cited as the source for many of
our still-current versions of adolescence.13 Popularizing the Romantic idea of
adolescent storm and stress, while simultaneously expounding the potential of
youth, and the need for increased state and familial monitoring and supervi-
sion, “[t]he sometimes auspicious, but frequently uneasy blending of evolution-
ary science, romanticism, and Victorian moralism produced both conservative
and progressive strains in Hall’s thought and helps to account for his broad
cultural appeal.”14 Adolescence is a book full of fascinating contradictions.
Despite the perceived importance of Adolescence at the time, Hall is now often
primarily remembered for introducing psychoanalysis to America, by bringing
Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi over for Freud’s one and only visit in 1909, for the
twentieth-anniversary celebrations of Clark University of which Hall was presi-
dent.15 Hall himself was an early admirer of Freud, claiming toward the end of
his life that “the advent of Freudianism marked the greatest epoch in the his-
tory of our science.”16 However, Hall also had some reservations about psychoa-
nalysis, believing that Freud’s insistence upon the importance of the sexual
could be taken to extremes: “If the Freudian claims of the all-dominance of sex
were excessive, as they certainly seem to me to be, it was only a natural reac-
tion to the long taboo and prudery that would not look facts in the face.”17 Hall
thought that psychoanalysis did sometimes fall prey to the “insidious danger
of inferring from the morbid to the normal,” and he was concerned about the
possible bad effects of a too-explicit sex education on the young.18 Like Freud
himself, in many ways, Hall’s beliefs straddled the Victorian and modern peri-
ods, arguing for more enlightened understandings of the ubiquity of sexual
behavior and desire, while simultaneously reinforcing Victorian assumptions
about gender, race, and sexuality. Freud himself initially saw Hall’s support as
an important foothold in America, writing to Pfister about him:
It is one of the pleasantest phantasies to imagine that somewhere far off,

without one’s having a glimmering of it, there are decent people finding
their way into our thoughts and efforts, who after all suddenly make their
appearance. That is what happened to me with Stanley Hall. Who could
have known that over there in America, only an hour away from Boston,
there was a respectable old gentleman waiting impatiently for the next
number of the Jahrbuch, reading and understanding it all, and who would
then, as he expressed it himself “ring the bells for us”?19
Freud was clearly moved by Hall’s early support, but disappointed by what he
saw as his subsequent defection.
Adolescence is one of those field-defining works that very few people have
read. It is so overloaded with barely digested data on every aspect of adoles-
cent existence that it seems at times like Hall’s key to all mythologies. It has
been described as a “feverish, recondite, and at times incomprehensible book;
the flawed achievement of an eccentric genius.”20 Despite its often self-contra-
dictory stances, the book had a large impact on educators, psychologists, and
social workers, selling more than twenty-five thousand copies in the United
States, and becoming a popular text book in a shorter version published in
1906.21 Adolescence “combined a variety of social fears about urbanization, the
degeneration of America’s ethnic makeup, and the enormous power the body
had on intellectual and social functioning.”22 It also celebrated adolescence

in ebullient rhetoric that owed much to Hall’s progressive evolutionary opti-
mism. Hall and Freud shared an interest in the recapitulationist evolutionary
theory originally popularized by Ernst Haeckel, often glossed as “ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny” in which the development of the individual is imag-
ined as mirroring the development of the race.23 Hall interpreted this doc-
trine literally, believing that
the progressive appearance of physical, psychological, and behavioural

attributes in the individual child’s development constituted a compressed
process of reliving all the earlier stages of ancestral evolution. In this scheme,
the embryo and young child first repeated all the stages of species develop-
ment and then the child and the adolescent went on to relive the stages of
human cultural evolution, from savagery to barbarism to civilization.24
Adolescence for Hall was a crucial hinge in this progressive historical narra-
tive; in a sense it was the stage in life in which (savage) nature and (civilized)
culture collided, and this collision potentially held great promise for the
future development of humanity. Hall writes of the evolutionary mutability
of the human animal:
While his bodily form is comparatively stable, his soul is in a transition

stage, and all that we call progress is more and more rapid. Old moorings
are constantly broken; adaptive plasticity to new environments—somatic,
economic, industrial, social, moral and religious—was never so great; and
in the changes which we hope are on the whole truly progressive, more
and more human traits are too partially acquired to be permanently inher-
ited. All this suggests that man is not a permanent type but an organism in
a very active stage of evolution toward a more permanent form.25
“Plasticity” is a favorite word of Hall’s. If humanity, for Hall, is in a perma-

nent state of evolutionary flux in both body and soul, the adolescent appears
to allegorize that transition. The adolescent, in the process of evolving toward
something greater, does so, paradoxically, by returning to the traits of our
collective past:
Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human
traits are now born . . . The child comes from and harks back to a remoter
past; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of
the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more
saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when old
moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate of
growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often doubled.26
The adolescent body develops rapidly, in fits and starts, promising a sud-
den revolution, but one predicated on the later developments of the race.
“Neo-atavism” refers to early culture or civilization, rather than the savage past
(which belongs in Hall’s schema to childhood). These “later acquisitions of the
race” are aligned with rupture and revolution, “old moorings” break in order
for humanity to attain a “higher level.” Culture, as in Freud’s Oedipal schema,
is predicated upon this ability to break with the past. This equation between
individual and collective development enables Hall to make Adolescence (and
adolescence) not simply the history of one stage of life, but rather a key to
understanding humanity’s entire evolutionary history. It is commonly argued
that recapitulation theory and Lamarckian theories of acquired characteristics
lost favor with natural scientists around the turn of the twentieth century
with the acceptance of August Weissman’s theory that chromosomes deter-
mined inheritance and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s genetic rules.27 But
the parallel between individual and species development has a long afterlife,
especially in those disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, in which cultural and
biological explanations for the human condition collide.28 Freud was fasci-
nated by recapitulation, and I want to suggest that this fascination, which he
shared with Hall, should be seen in relation to available narratives of cultural
and biological inheritance. For Hall, these narratives place the adolescent at
a crucial developmental point from which a wholly different shared future
might emerge.29 To put it another way, if Freud is fascinated by our (savage,
archaic) past, then Hall turns his recapitulatory desires toward the future.
When Hall’s interests don’t immediately strike modern readers as danger-
ously racist (one chapter in Adolescence is titled, ominously, “Ethnic Psychology
and Pedagogy, or Adolescent Races and Their Treatment”), they may appear
to us as almost comically wide-ranging. An abridged list of the titles of a few
years’ worth of his publications gives us a sense of his voracious intellect:
1911:
In Life’s Drama Sex Plays the Leading Part
Eugenics: Its Ideals and What it is going to do
The Problem of Dependent Races
The Efficiency of Humanity
1912:
The Genetic View of Berkeley’s Religious Motivation
Children’s Rights
Why Kant is Passing
Keeping Children Well. The Necessity of Proper Sanitation in Home
and School.
1915:
The Medieval Universities and Some of their Lessons for us
The Psychology of the Nativity
Teaching the War
Yankee and Jew
1916:
What we owe to the tree-life of our Ape-like Ancestors
The glue that holds together these opinions is genetic; from Hall’s perspective,
recapitulation theory suggested that we could make sense of the development
of the individual by studying the tree-life of our “Ape-like Ancestors,” and that
a healthy Rousseauian “natural” education of the young was crucial in keep-
ing humanity evolving toward greater things. Adolescence itself is omnivorous
in scope, covering the biology of bodily functions (vol. I, chapter II, “Growth
in Parts and Organs during Adolescence”); delinquency (vol. I, chapter V,
“Juvenile Faults, Immoralities, and Crimes”); sexuality (vol. I, chapter VI,
“Sexual Development: Its Dangers and Hygiene in Boys” and vol. I, chapter VII,
“Periodicity”); psychology and religion (vol. II, chapter XIV, “The Adolescent
Psychology of Conversion”); pedagogy (vol. II, chapter XVII, “Adolescent Girls
and their Education”); and anthropology, including the discussion of “adoles-
cent” cultures (vol. II, chapter XII, “Savage Public Initiations, Classical Ideas
and Customs, and Church Confirmation” and vol. II, chapter XVII, “Ethnic
Psychology and Pedagogy, or Adolescent Races and Their Treatment”). It
seems symptomatic that I too find myself succumbing to the lure of the list
when writing about Hall, whose expansive style locates him squarely in a great
American tradition of cataloging. There is a case to be made for Adolescence as
the Moby Dick of psychological treatises (Hall covers literature as well with the
final chapter of vol. I, chapter VIII, “Adolescence in Literature, Biography and
History”).30
In some senses Hall’s ambitious grasping for a theory of everything resem-
bles Freud’s steady colonization of other disciplines such as anthropology and
aesthetics. Hall wrote admiringly of this aspect of Freud’s thought: at the end
of a long list of what he likes about psychoanalysis, he says,
[P]erhaps, most important of all, the gradual extension of Freudian views

into the domain of biography, history, literature, religion, hygiene, sociol-
ogy and art, so that the activities they inspired outside of the medical field
came to be even greater in volume and importance that those within it—all
this made it so genetic and vital that it came to me to seem almost like a new
dispensation in the domain of psychology, so that from 1910, when Freud
visited us, it and its wider implications became of central interest to me.31
Both Hall and Freud held fast to their ambitious overarching psychological
theories in the face of criticism, and both set their sights on building institu-
tions that would support those theories.
For the sake of a more focused comparison between Hall and Freud, I will
here consider only one aspect of Hall’s interest in adolescence, the gendered
differences in the management of boys’ and girls’ sexual and mental develop-
ment at puberty. Hall often portrays adolescents as bundles of sexual energy,
capable of reproducing but expected not to, waiting to explode. He returns
again and again to the problem of stored versus used energy. However, that
energy is diverted into different directions in boys and girls—masturbation is
a problem for boys, menstruation the main source of tension for girls. Hall’s
descriptions of women are, in many aspects, easy to recognize. Writing in
a time-tested tradition of biological essentialism, Hall celebrates the joys of

menstruation, the gateway to women achieving their evolutionary reproduc-
tive destinies. Like Freud, but with more rhetorical flourish, he sends his girls
inward—to wallow happily in their newfound sexual maturity (and blood):
“She feels her womanhood and glories in it like a goddess . . . The flow itself
has been a pleasure and the end of it is a slight shock.”32
Harm can result if the importance of menstruation is ignored by educa-
tors, parents, and social institutions responsible for the nurturance of young
women:
The cohesions between the elements of personality are loosened by the

disparities of both somatic and psychic development, and if there is an
arrest at any stage or in any part before the higher unity is achieved there
is almost sure to be degeneration and reunion on a lower level than before.
One of the gravest dangers is the persistent ignoring by feminists of the
prime importance of establishing normal periodicity in girls, to the needs
of which everything else should for a few years be secondary.33
In this sense, according to Hall, young women are, or should be, governed
by biology and cyclicality. Young women’s time, as posited here, is inward
and repetitive.34 By contrast, Hall’s boys, like Freud’s in The Three Essays on
Sexuality, turn outward, away from the family: “Normal adolescent boys espe-
cially wish to explore night out-of-doors, to rove about perhaps with adven-
turous or romantic thoughts, and on moonlight nights particularly there is a
pathos about the necessity of rest.”35 Often, as the newly emergent criminal
and pedagogical discourse of the juvenile delinquent are eager to point out,
they wind up on street corners.36 The adolescent boy is nature’s flaneur: “At
the dawn of adolescence this impulse to migrate or wander shows a great and
sudden increase . . . Home seems narrow, monotonous, intolerable, and the
street and the motley passers-by interest and invite to be up and away.”37
The adolescent boy roams in both Hall’s and Freud’s myths of maturation;
in Freud he is exiled and Oedipally enraged; in Hall, restless and wandering.
Freud’s trajectory of masculine adolescence, then, relies on the Oedipus model
and the incest taboo as a narrative spur, the adolescent boy is driven to leave
the family, while the girl lacks this propulsion. If, however, we turn to Hall’s
emphasis on girls’ periodicity and his stories of roving boys, there we find
that neither narrative is as driven toward teleology as Freud’s Oedipus. Hall’s
girls, during adolescence, slowly develop toward regular cyclicality; Hall’s
boys wander in a kind of picaresque; neither story makes, in this sense, a con-
vincing bildungsroman. Through a narrative lens, then, we might see adoles-
cence, for Hall, as a point of narrative interruption, breakage, or repetition,
rather than of clear developmental, or evolutionary forward movement.
For Hall, the wandering of the boy is a necessary developmental stage, before
entering adulthood and the progressive teleologies that adulthood entails.
Hall assigned a prime importance to letting each developmental stage, even
apparently antisocial ones, have its full expression. He saw adolescence as
a cathartic stage, believing that the release of ugly feelings and actions at a
controlled place or time might prevent them from occurring later in life. For
Hall’s sense of the evolution of the individual, every stage of growth was a
vital link to the one that followed it:
Should environmental pressures suppress a given stage, the course of

development might become arrested or retarded . . . Catharsis insulated
the “nature is right” principle from the objection that many propensi-
ties, including avarice, disobedience and aggression, were hardly right.
It required that an uncivilized trait characteristic of early racial history
should be exercised in childhood to prevent its occurrence in adult years.
By allowing children, for example, to express cruelty in mild forms of pas-
sion, by kicking the dog or twisting a sibling’s arm, they would be rendered
immune to expressions of cruelty in adolescence and adulthood.38
Adolescence, then, is a time for acting out potentially ugly emotions and
scenes, which will need to be eliminated or suppressed later. Catharsis gave
Hall one way of thinking about the uses of the uncontainable affects and
bodily mess of adolescence: “[T]his is an age of wasteful ways, awkwardnesses,
mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital energy, perhaps
semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements, more elaborated than
in childhood and often highly unaesthetic and disagreeable, motor coordi-
nations that will need laborious decomposition later.”39 The adolescent here
appears as a gawky, leaky mistake that will need to be entirely remade at some
later date. And yet that mistake is simultaneously vital, wonderful, brimming
with evolutionary promise.
The temporality of adolescence was exceedingly complicated and rich for
Hall in his diverse roles as cataloguer, anthropologist, educator, celebrator,
and diagnoser of modern adolescence. It was the time when the desirability
of a Rousseauian education in nature (to keep the child as close to the state
of nature as possible) began to encounter societal demands; when Hall’s cel-
ebration of the messy savagery of adolescence met a perceived evolutionary
imperative toward progress and heteronormative productive and reproduc-
tive teleologies. There is an impossible and exhilarating abundance of expla-
nation in Hall’s Adolescence, which in a sense releases him from the narrative
neatness of Freud’s sometimes overly schematic Oedipal injunctions.40 If
much of Hall’s analysis of adolescent development works in the same direc-
tion as Freud’s, he is also clearly willing to consider evidence apart from the
sexual drive. For one thing he is a pedagogue with advice to offer on how
best to guide the adolescent’s development, from outdoor play to religious
ecstasy to the moulding of those “plastic” adolescent muscles. The overarch-
ing story to which Hall is committed may serve to turn his diffuse collec-
tion of evidence about the adolescent into a teleology in which the stages
of individual development always mirror the stages of racial development,
and both must be folded back into a progressive narrative. However, in the
next section I will suggest that for Hall, this progression can be destabilized
by the disruptive potential of the adolescent’s imaginary relation to his-

tory, which may make even the most powerful institution builders of early
twentieth-century psychology—Freud, Jung, and Hall—incapable of captur-
ing fully the meanings of this strange, plastic time.
* * *
Hall’s article “A Medium in the Bud” appeared in the American Journal of

Psychology in April 1918, nine years after Freud’s visit to America. It con-
cerns Hall’s extended study of, and Freud and Jung’s brief encounter with, an
adolescent spirit medium.41 Although profoundly sceptical of spiritualism’s
claims, and himself a debunker of mediums, Hall was fascinated by the psy-
chology of spiritualism. He had an ongoing argument with William James
about what Hall saw as James’s gullibility about spirit mediums, in particular
his support for the Boston medium Mrs. Piper, James’s “white crow.”42 In an
article “Spooks and Telepathy” that appeared in Appleton’s Magazine in 1908,
Hall dismissed spiritualism in strong terms: “Spiritism in its cruder forms is
the very sewage of all the superstition of ages, and it is the common enemy of
true science and true religion. Culture of every kind began in the denial of its
claims. To clear up its dense jungles and to drain its fetid morasses is one of
the chief endeavors of science.”43
Why then devote much time and effort to “A Medium in the Bud”? In
what follows I will try to show why Hall found himself so drawn to spiritu-
alism even as he vehemently rejected it. The article in question describes a
girl, Annie, who came to see Hall in 1908 “before Freud was much known in
this country.”44 She claimed to have mediumistic powers. According to Hall,
Annie was “bright, impressionable, perhaps unusually given to adolescent
reveries.”45 Annie had been brought up in isolation by an eccentric mother
who also communed with spirits and who encouraged her daughter’s medi-
umship. Amy Tanner, who worked with Hall in his spiritualist investigations,
also published an account of their sessions with Annie in her book Studies
in Spiritism, which was partially cowritten with Hall. She describes the rela-
tionship between mother and daughter thus: “As adolescence approached,
the daughter inevitably nourished her soul on dreams of greatness, and the
mother, given to visions of another world, was lynx-eyed to interpret every
oscillation of mood as due to spirits pressing in upon her daughter’s soul.”46
At 17, when Annie first began to visit mediums, she was told by the spirit
world that she was destined for some great work. In the meantime, she devel-
oped a circle of spirit familiars “who played the same part in her life that
companions of her own age do in the life of any normal girl. They helped her
trim dresses and hats, advised her about family troubles, health, etc.”47
Annie sought out Hall after reading an account of some lectures on the psy-
chology of spirit phenomena that he’d given at Clark. Along with Tanner and
another colleague, Hall held a series of sittings with Annie, who came to see
them regularly and communicated through various spirit guides. According
to Hall she often appeared tentative and unsure, as if her commitment to the
reality of the spirit world was still in question. Annie’s case was clearly not
straightforward fraud, rather it revealed a mixture of conscious and uncon-
scious motives behind her mediumship. In her book, Tanner describes Annie
as “sincere and free from fraud,” going on to say that her intent is not to
expose duplicity but rather “to show how alien to the mind of the medium
herself is the true cause of her states.”48 The psychology of spiritualism can be
explained by psychoanalysis’s analysis of the deceptive unconscious, which
suggests that we can’t always maintain secure boundaries between lying to
ourselves and lying to others. The mind (and body) of the medium here, like
the mind and body of the hysteric, is defined as that which is incapable of
knowing itself, becoming instead a case for professional experts to interpret
and diagnose.49
Annie, brought up in an environment in which spirit communication was
the norm, seemed naturally impressionable, taking any suggestion from her
examiners and weaving it into her spirits’ conversation. Her topics were fairly
typical—God’s plans for the development of man and mind, the nebulae, and
the condition of Mars. (All this is familiar ground for séance reports from the
time). Hall writes: “Her bottom purpose grew more and more clear to us . . . to
so convince us that she had a revelation for the world, that we should sum-
mon a larger group of the most eminent scientific experts to listen, question,
test the truths the spirits were revealing through her, that the world would
come to realize their existence.”50
Hall and Tanner maintained a sympathetic demeanor toward the girl in
order to expose her psychological motivations. To reveal the speciousness
of her claims to contact with the spirit world, Hall fed her false information
about a dead but fictional niece of his, S.B., who then became one of Annie’s
primary spirit guides. S.B. eventually revealed that there was more to the
story of Annie then met the eye, stating “roundly that her motive in all this
mediumship was to get a hearing at which a man with whom she had fallen
in love could be present and would be impressed, as she wished him to be,
with her sagacity, ability, and importance, etc.”51 According to Annie’s spirit
guides, there was a family scandal that she felt was blocking her chances with
her desired object. Spiritualism, paradoxically, was imagined as a way to gain
respectable attention and to clear her family’s name. Annie believed that
the many and very serious clouds which has rested upon the girl and her
family had prevented the lover from declaring himself . . . and that if we
could only arrange to invite him with the savants to see the girl in the
midst of her séance with the wise men taking notes, all his scruples would
be overcome and he would hasten to avow the love which he undoubtedly
felt, but had been hindered from expressing.52
This erotically charged, medicalized scene, of the young woman at the

center of a circle of entranced wise men taking notes, is one that Hall finds
key for understanding the recent history of spiritualism, and the scientists
and eminent men who investigate it.53 He writes about it at length in “Spooks
and Telepathy,” rhetorically, at least, appearing to succumb to the scene’s

seduction himself, even as he dismisses the “eminent dupes” who were inca-
pable of seeing past young mediums’ feminine attractions:
It would be invidious even to mention the eminent men who, in the last
thirty years, not to go back toward the dawn of history, have been deceived
to the top of their bent by such characters, chiefly by young and apparently
unsophisticated girls. A number of these have been elaborately studied,
made the theme of learned treatises, prompted new, weird theories of the
soul and the body, and even of the universe, and then in the end they have
either been detected in or else confessed to the grossest fraud. And then,
strangely enough, these eminent dupes have turned to others of similar
ilk, who have not yet been detected. Masters of the physical and natural
sciences without the lifelong training in abnormal psychology now need-
ful to know it, have been led strange dances by seeming ingénues. Some
of these naïve Backfische, with their braids of hair sedately hanging down
their back, apparently paragons of innocence and unconscious, childlike
sincerity, have really been preternaturally and plenarily endowed with all
the craft and cunning to be found in the soul of woman—a field so vast
that even psychologists are now only just realizing that as yet they know
almost nothing about it. How these budding girls love to create situations
and sensations!54
Seen in this light, Hall’s medium in the bud might appear like one in a series
of deceptively innocent, but really dangerous, attention-seeking, young
women, whose sedate hairstyles belie their underlying essentially female
“craft and cunning.” And yet, as I have already indicated, this particular case
is not presented as conscious fraud; rather the erotics are, in one sense, on the
surface, eventually confessed (at least by Annie’s spirit guide). However, for
Hall, the unraveling of the case also required the expert debunking power of
Freud and Jung, a sophisticated notion of the unconscious, and a willingness
to discover sexual motivation.
In telling the story of “A Medium in the Bud” Hall initially portrays him-
self as one of those duped wise men who saw no sign of erotic motivation in
Annie when he first met her:
Surely it seemed that here we have no trace of any sex motivation, and
in this naïve and innocent soul the deliverances of the early séances con-
tained nothing whatever to suggest ever so remotely any erotic factors; nor
indeed anything else abnormal . . . the center of interest to us seemed to be
in the far-flung and exceptional magnificence of the idealistic imagery,
which makes the teens the golden age of imagination.55
But Hall soon realizes his mistake and, in the article, sets up his error as a
way of paying tribute to psychoanalysis’s superior knowledge of the motives
of adolescent girls. The erotic element, which Hall had thought absolutely
absent from Annie when he began his investigations, is actually crucial.

When Freud and Jung visit, Hall arranges a meeting with Annie:
in a short interview with her they at once diagnosed the true nature of it
all, and to my surprise she frankly confessed that her chief motive from
the first had been to win the love of her adored one . . . The erotic motiva-
tion was obvious and the German savants saw little further to interest
them in the case, and I was a trifle mortified that now the purpose so long
hidden from us was so conscious and so openly confessed.56
Hall sets himself up as a “mortified” naive reader, who took ages to discover
the centrality of the sexual element immediately apparent to the sophisti-
cated psychoanalytic visitors. He does this in part to demonstrate the worth
of psychoanalysis. Although nine years have intervened between Freud and
Jung’s visit and the publication of the article, Hall remains a supporter of
Freud’s contentions about the importance of the sexual motive in human life.
However, Hall may also reveal his reservations about psychoanalysis in this
apparently flattering anecdote. Once they have diagnosed Annie as a case of
erotic fixation, Freud and Jung dismiss her without another thought. In this
sense, Annie’s desire to be the center of attention to a group of intrigued, older,
and expert men is foiled by psychoanalysis’s apparently superior knowledge
of her motives and meanings; she becomes a different sort of wearily familiar
“case” to these particular savants.
But for Hall she is also crucially a “case” of his treasured life stage, ado-
lescence, “the golden age of the imagination.” Although supporting Freud’s
interpretation of erotic obsession, Hall also adds the following:
There is in all the wide domain of psychology perhaps no such terra incog-
nita as the heart of the adolescent girl . . . Perhaps all the light shed by this
case is darkness. The adult, painstaking, male mind may be hopelessly
incompetent to understand the effervescence of the ephebic girl, for he
has often been at her mercy. Perhaps in all girls at this stage of life there
is a period of hysterical longing to be the center of attention that stops at
nothing to fool wiseacres to the top of their bent . . . Or finally it is just pos-
sible that some credence in imaginary converse with the great departed
we read of in history, or with angelic or planetary souls, may be a mode of
developing the soul of the adolescent girl by giving vent to her struggling,
very diverse and too often mutually suppressed impulsions, and that this
helps on to a fuller and more rounded development.57
Hall, of course, made the terra incognita of the adolescent girl (and boy) his
territory in Adolescence. Here, in the intersection between spiritualism and
adolescence, Hall sees something that Freudian psychoanalysis may have no
time for, or interest in. Perhaps the young girl does pull the wool over the eyes
of old men, for whom she becomes an erotic spectacle, hence fulfilling her
desire for attention and importance; perhaps she both is and is not aware of
her own motivation and her own fraud. But Hall also privileges a differently
inflected interpretation of Annie’s spirit communications, which sees the wild
imaginings of the spiritualist séance as potentially cathartic, allowing the ado-
lescent girl to escape her own limited and fixed place in history through an
imaginary relationship to the great unknown. Spiritualism becomes a way of
breaking the suffocating boundaries of the young powerless individual sub-
ject. It becomes a way of conversing with angels, planets, the historical past.
This is a gendered argument. Hall suggests this version of catharsis may be
particularly important for young girls who find themselves drawn to male
spirit guides:
Thus there is a sudden freedom from responsibility and sensitive, shrink-

ing, repressed natures, who would above all things dread to shock or vio-
late convention in phrase or manner, are freed from the necessity of even
being agreeable or primly proper, which must become irksome, hedged
about as they are by so many senseless taboos . . . Such tender and delicate
girls often feel themselves possessed by some rugged, potent and often
uncouth male spirit, and delight to swagger in diction and manner . . . The
girl is thus using new powers and in some sense may be the better for it.58
Suddenly, at the end of an article premised on the fact that spiritualism is

primarily nonsense (as Hall undoubtedly believes), it is also psychologically
important; its fraudulent nonsense is a tool for the development of the soul
(as well as for, perhaps, a nascent feminist agenda).59 Where Freud and Jung
see little to interest them in an erotically fixated, attention-seeking spiritual-
ist girl, Hall sees an adolescent break for freedom, at both the individual and
racial level, a spiritual striving that he wants to celebrate.
Recent historians have argued that from the mid-nineteenth century
onward, spiritualism provided opportunities for fantasized connections with
the past, which often served to remake affiliations across gender, race, and
history, allowing for a plethora of different political and cultural forma-
tions.60 For Hall the evolutionary and “neo-atavistic” potential of the adoles-
cent provides something similar, a state of possibility predicated on the hope
for humanity’s uncharted future evolutionary development. The fixity of a
stable adulthood is shunted aside in Adolescence, so that Hall can linger in the
adolescent’s instability, awkwardness, and motion:
[F]or those prophetic souls interested in the future of our race and desirous
of advancing it, the field of adolescence is the quarry in which they must
seek to find both goal and means. If such a higher stage is ever added to
our race, it will not be by increments at any later plateau of adult life, but it
will come by increased development of the adolescent stage, which is the
bud of promise for the race.61
This “bud” of promise recalls Annie, the medium in the bud. Although
Hall generally rejects spiritualists as frauds or self-deluded, he also allows for
spiritualism’s attractions, both to the girl longing to break out of a confined

and constricted life, and to the psychologist, committed to a version of reca-
pitulationist history, which requires that individual and collective history
lives on in a potentially ghostly way, in our bodies and minds. But along-
side this apparently determinist march toward parallel individual and race
development (in which successful adulthood is achieved via progress through
fixed stages) come also the radical breaks necessary for leaps in development
to take place, for the past to propel us toward our proper, as yet unwritten,
evolutionary future.62 With this in mind we might better understand the
apparent contradictions between Hall’s biological essentialism (his insistence
upon the overarching importance of periodicity for women) and an incipient
feminist perspective, one in which the “bud of promise” for the human race
might be found in the tentative language of a self-deluded, erotically fixated,
20-year-old girl medium.
Hall’s theories of adolescence are sprawling and self-contradictory; his
reliance on recapitulation to ground his ideas about adolescence may now
appear racist, essentialist, and troubling. But these once familiar versions of
evolutionary progress may also serve to remind us of the interruptions and
reconfigurations of accepted developmental stories that spiritualism and reca-
pitulationist theory made imaginatively available to early twentieth-century
thought. Let us not forget that Freud’s devotion to phylogenetic history and
recapitulation led him to speculate in Totem and Taboo that the actual murder
of the primal father in prehistoric times, by the horde of sons, and the sons’
subsequent remorse for the crime, was the original grounds for society, cul-
ture, and civilization. Freud’s strange phylogenetic myth, the Oedipal com-
plex writ large onto culture, suggests that it is a crowd of rebellious adolescent
brothers that sets all human history in motion. Perhaps they, like Annie, the
unconvinced and unconvincing medium, might take their place in a litany
of Anna Freud’s stepchildren, the adolescents whom her father forgot, but
whom G. Stanley Hall remembered and celebrated.
Notes
1. Anna Freud, “Adolescence” (1958), in The Writings of Anna Freud, Research at the
Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and Other Papers 1956–65, vol. V (New York: International
Universities Press, Inc., 1969), 136–166, 138.
2. Ibid., 141.
3. As Jacqueline Rose says about the fraught dynamics of psychoanalysis, “There will be
no transmission if the second generation refuses the legacy of the ancestors; a rebellious
daughter will not obey or perpetuate her father’s law. But if that law is the law of the
unconscious, then a subservient one paradoxically disobeys and undoes his heritage no
less at the very point of surrender” (Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics
and The Return of Melanie Klein [Oxford: Blackwell, 1993], 193).
4. Sigmund Freud, Foreword to August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth (New York: Putnam,
1932) (1925), v.
5. See Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy (‘Little Hans’)” (1909),
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, James Strachey, ed., vol 10
(London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–149; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child
and Mother (London: Virago, 1983); and Rose, Why War?
6. See Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (“Dora”) 1905 [1901],
in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 7
(London: Hogarth, 1955), 1–122; “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a
Woman” (1920), in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 145–72; and Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer,
“Studies on Hysteria” (1895), in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1955).
7. Anna Freud, “Adolescence,” 144.
8. For more sustained readings of these two cases, see Charles Bernheimer and Claire
Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (London: Virago, 1985); and
Ronnie C. Lesser and Thomas Domenici, eds., That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s
Female Homosexual Revisited (New York: Routledge, 1999).
9. A note about terminology: Puberty refers explicitly to biological changes, while adoles-
cence is a little more wide-ranging as a descriptive term. Adolescence is from the French
for coming to maturity, whereas puberty refers specifically to body hair and the reach-
ing of sexual maturity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, adolescence is ordi-
narily considered as extending from 14 to 25 in males, and from 12 to 21 in females,
which raises the question, relevant to Freud and Hall, of whether the adolescent male
and female were considered, for the sake of classification, different species.
10. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Penguin Freud Library 7: 32–169,
143–144.
11. Ibid., 150.
12. The Child Study Movement was launched by Hall in 1891 in order to gather extensive
scientific and observational evidence about children so as to make childhood education
into the “science of human nature” (G. Stanley Hall, “Child Study: The Basis of Exact
Education,” Forum 16 [1893], 429–441, 441). Hall’s Clark University became the center
of the movement, which encouraged parents and teachers to gather large amounts of
data about their children on everything from belief in Santa Claus through responses
to tickling through questionnaires. The movement dissipated by 1910 and Hall’s large
plans for Child Study were never fulfilled, but it left a lasting legacy of parental interest
in children’s education. See G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New
York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923), 379, 393; and Ludy T. Benjamin, A Brief History of
Modern Psychology (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 64–65.
13. For the best overview of Hall, see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). For Hall’s importance to twentieth-century
perspectives on adolescence, see Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America,
1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural
Construction of Adolescence (New York and London: Routledge Falmer, 2001); and Crista
DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007), among others.
14. DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 94.
15. For the most complete account of this trip, see Saul Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung and Hall the
King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909) (St. Louis: Rana House, Hogrefe &
Huber Publishers, 1992).
16. Hall, Life and Confessions, 409.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. II (New York: Basic Books, 1959),
57–58 (Pfister, October 4, 1909).
20. Kett, Rites of Passage, 6.
21. DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 95.
22. Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-
the-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 16.
23. Haeckel’s theory was an embryological one, suggesting that the human embryo devel-
ops through the same stages of the forms of the major groups of adult animals forming
a linear chain of being. This was adopted, by Hall and others, to become a theory of
individual growth and development throughout the life cycle, and a theory of culture.
See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).
24. DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 95–96.
25. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology,
Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton, 1925), vol. I,
vii.
26. Hall, Adolescence, vol. I, xiii.
27. See DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 95.
28. See Gould’s entertaining introduction to Ontogeny and Phylogeny where he tells stories of
his colleagues pulling him aside in hallways to whisper conspiratorily that they think
“there really is something to it after all” (Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1–2).
29. For more on Freud’s fascination with phylogenetic history, see Sigmund Freud, A
Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, ed. with an essay by Ilse
Grubrich-Simitis, trans. Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press, 1987); and Robert A. Paul, “Did the Primal Crime Take Place?” Ethos 4.3 (Autumn
1976): 311–352.
30. A fascinating short consideration of these and other aspects of Hall’s Adolescence in
relation to modernism is Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the
Constituency of Writing (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), chapter 2, “Boys:
Manufacturing Inefficiency,” 51–73.
31. Hall, Life and Confessions, 410.
32. Hall, Adolescence, vol. I, 493
33. Ibid., xiv.
34. See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 187–213.
35. Hall, Adolescence, vol. I, 264.
36. See Gilbert, Before Modernism Was.
37. Hall, Adolescence, vol. II, 377.
38. Robert F. Grinder, “The Concept of Adolescence in the Genetic Psychology of G. Stanley
Hall,” Child Development 4.2 (June 1969), 355–369, 359.
40. “I hold that the Oedipus complex is unhappily named because Oedipus did not know
his father or mother and that the phenomena it designates are somewhat less common
than this theory assumes . . . ” (Hall, Life and Confessions, 410–411).
41. G. Stanley Hall, “A Medium in the Bud,” American Journal of Psychology 29 (April 1918),
144–158. Also see DeLuzio, Female Adolescence, 71, on the common use of “budding” in
relation to the adolescent girl.
42. Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung and Hall, 89–91.
43. G. Stanley Hall, “Spooks and Telepathy,” Appleton’s Magazine (December 1908), 677–683, 679.
44. Hall, “Medium,” 144.
45. Ibid., 145.
46. A. E. Tanner, Studies in Spiritism (New York: Appleton, 1910), chapter XVII, “The Medium
in Germ,” 275. It is interesting that the girl’s moods swings, which many mothers might
have chalked up to menstruation, are here assigned to the spirits
47. Ibid., 275.
48. Ibid., 274.
49. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the talking cure, the ways in which self-knowledge
and cure must emerge from the patient’s speech, might be productively compared to
and contrasted with the (truthful and/or deceptive) speech that emerges in the séance.
51. Ibid., 151.
52. Ibid., 151–152.
53. It is a scene that is also at the center of the visual imagery of Charcot’s investigations
into hysteria at the Salpetriere. I might add here that the scene is clearly as compelling
to Hall’s imaginary landscape as it is to Annie’s, raising the question of precisely whose

fantasy is at stake here?
54. Hall, “Spooks and Telepathy,” 680.
56. Ibid., 156.
57. Ibid., 157.
58. Ibid., 154.
59. Alex Owen has written extensively about the ways in which the Victorian séance room
“became a battle ground across which the tensions implicit in the acquisition of gen-
dered subjectivity” were played out (Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and
Spiritualism in Late Victorian England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990], 11). Hall’s argument, perhaps surprisingly, follows a feminist line similar to
Owen’s.
60. See Alex Owen and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural
Politics of Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008);
Diane Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences (New York: New
York University Press, 1992); Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From
the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Amy
Lehman, Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists
in Performance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009).
62. The layered or palimpsestic temporalities of spiritualism and of recapitulationist theo-
ries seem to me to be interestingly parallel, but that would be the subject of another
article.
Part III
Psychoanalysis and Historical
Subjectivities
9
Historical Subjectivity
Barbara Taylor
This chapter explores the historical aspects of human subjectivity, and the
subjective elements of historical understanding. It opens with a critique of
what I regard as an over-historicised concept of subjectivity common within
the Humanities, and then goes on to argue that historical understanding
involves an empathic connection between the historian and her human sub-
jects, a connection made possible by the species similarity between individ-
ual subjectivities across place and time.
* * *
The history of selfhood attracted little attention in the Anglo-American acad-

emy until the 1980s, when publications began to proliferate. Much of the ini-
tial impetus for this came from literary scholars investigating early modern
subjectivity, but soon these were joined by cultural historians working a wide
range of topics, from gender and sexuality to madness, criminality, and the
history of the emotions.1 Today the subjective phenomena under investigation
are more richly disparate than ever, and the history of selfhood is a recognized
field.2 But while the themes are diverse, the resulting histories are often strik-
ingly similar in their underlying premises. Subjectivity, it is widely argued (or
assumed, as the argument is now so general), is no timeless, cultureless essence
of personhood, but a cultural artifact that mutates over time. The present-day
notion of an inner self—an ego, source and site of personal identity—is no
human eternal but a contingent product of Western modernity. A line of his-
torical development is traced from a premodern, “extensive” self—a selfhood
rooted in communal life, lacking any sense of individual identity—to modern
Western subjectivity: a “bounded, unique” selfhood possessing innate charac-
ter and psychological interiority, the “unitary” or “deep” self as this modern
subjectivity is often described.3 The narrative retells the familiar story of the
rise of individualism, with the additional twist that it is not just the individu-
alist character type that is said to originate with modernity but psychological
195
196 Barbara Taylor
subjectivity in toto. The private universe of psychic life—of affectivity, desire,

need, fantasy—is also a historical construct, we are told, a product of modern
Western humanism.4
By the end of the twentieth century this historicist account of subjectivity,
originally presented as a first-order heresy, had become such an article of faith
in many academic circles that alternative views tended to be rejected out of
hand. How did this come about, and what are its consequences? “Subjectivity
is scary,” the French historian Linda Orr writes, “it evokes anxiety.”5 Has sub-
jectivity became a scholarly bugaboo and, if so, at what cost to historical
understanding?
* * *
The “death of the subject” at the hands of Western intellectuals in the 1960s
and 1970s marked the birth of an exhilarating new phase in Western history
writing. The exposé of the modern self as a transient social creation, a “face
drawn in the sand”—the image is Michel Foucault’s—liberated the historical
imagination.6 Where once there had been a fixed, unitary “human nature,”
suddenly there was flux, mutation, an endless play of contingency. Heresy was
in the air, and the language was correspondingly militant. “Man,” Foucault
wrote in 1966, in Les Mots et les Choses, “is . . . a figure not yet two centuries
old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge . . . that will disappear as soon as that
knowledge has discovered a new form.” “There is no such thing as a human
nature independent of culture,” the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
a key influence on emergent cultural history, declared in 1973, while in
France—where these ideas had their widest philosophical currency—Jacques
Derrida described Western selfhood as a linguistic illusion, a mirage of inner
coherence generated via the ceaseless action of sign systems.7 The human
subject, Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 1980 in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning,
the seminal work of New Historicism, is not the “timeless, cultureless” figure
of Western humanism but an “ideological product of the relations of power
in a particular society.”8 Subjects are fashioned by cultural “control mecha-
nisms,” Greenblatt quoted Geertz, which, operating through language and
other communal “meaning systems,” penetrate to the innermost recesses of
the human personality, molding selfhood from inside out. There is no pri-
vate self, no inner world beyond sociality; or as a leading British Foucauldian
put it, “[W]e are ‘assembled’ selves, in whom all the ‘private’ effects of psy-
chological interiority are constituted by our linkage into ‘public’ languages,
practices, techniques and artefacts.”9
For scholars impatient with the conventions of positivist history, this was
heady stuff, as long-standing binaries between self and society, inner and
outer, private and public wobbled and then deconstructed under the new
theoretical pressures. The thinkers I quoted earlier are not intellectual ana-
logues; their views differ sharply in important respects. But as deployed by
new-wave literary scholars and cultural historians, they were made to deliver
a uniform—and enticingly iconoclastic—message: “It is not subjects who
Historical Subjectivity 197
produce meaning, but . . . networks of meaning that create subjects.”10 The self
is a discursive artifact: there is no extrasocial “I” but only culturally assigned
identities that shift and transmute over time. Subjectivity is the realm of Clio,
not Psyche.
Like many intellectual bouleversements, this new move—the so-called lin-
guistic or cultural turn11—was not unprecedented. Historicists of earlier
generations had also pronounced against human nature (“there is no man
but only men,” the Annaliste Lucien Febvre declared in 192512) and the rise
of social history in the 1960s, with its blend of functionalist sociology and
Marxisant materialism, had bolstered this position. Calcified notions of “ide-
ology” (ideational “superstructures” standing on an economic “base”) were
discarded as historians explored structural linguistics and semiotics and
began to view the individual as “an ‘effect’ of discourse . . . a position assigned
by and within discursive practices.”13 The change in fact was not as total as it
first appeared. Social historians accustomed to perceiving people as bearers of
material relations did not have to strain too hard to conceive them as occupy-
ing “discursive subject positions.”14 What gave this revisionism its heretical
bite was less this revamped social determinism than the politics behind it, as
one subaltern group after another seized on its critical potential. Feminists
led the way, repudiating biophysiological, “essentialist” accounts of woman-
hood in favor of a “genuine historicization and deconstruction of the terms
of sexual difference.”15 Suddenly “woman”—that eternal, universal Other—
began appearing in quotation marks to indicate her contingent, factitious sta-
tus. Likewise “man,” although this took longer; and other identifying features
previously treated as inborn and immutable, such as sexual orientation and
racial traits. A world of protean identities opened up, as hidebound stereotypes
deconstructed under the onslaught.16
This development, triggered by French philosophy but encouraged, espe-
cially in America and, to a lesser extent, in Britain, by the rise of new aca-
demic constituencies, especially women and ethnic minorities, sent a wave
of creative energy through the humanities. In some respects this was—I want
to emphasize—a very big step forward. It is too easy now to forget how many
wrong and injurious ideas once sheltered under the rubric of “human nature.”
Subjectivities construed as inherently passive, as in the Freudian feminine
subject, or hardwired for aggression, as in biogenetic accounts of masculinity,
presented versions of psychic life heavily distorted by unacknowledged social
freight. Throwing off this egregious baggage was a major advance, one that
still deserves championing today in the face of prejudicial stereotypes masked
as scientific naturalism.
But this revisionism exacted a price. The image of the human self that
emerged in its wake was an increasingly dark one. Repudiating the heroic,
self-defining subject of Western humanism, many scholars embraced in its
stead a Foucauldian “subjectivated” self, one wholly dominated by cultural
forces. To be a self was to be colonized by identity regimes, locked into the
discursive logics of a disciplinary order. Power—not sociality, or belief, or
the affections—was the primum mobile of subjectivity, as it was of all human
198 Barbara Taylor
experience. In itself, the human self was nothing, a mere reflex of power
located elsewhere—in patriarchy, in capital, in that omnipresent, amorphous
engine of compulsion known as “govermentality.” Not all postmodern schol-
ars conceived selfhood this way, at least not explicitly, but the pressure to do
so was strong, once the underlying premises were accepted.17
Among historians these ideas, at least in their most uncompromising versions,
acquired only minority support—and those promoting them came in for much
criticism.18 But there were influential figures among them, and this, combined
with a growing dissatisfaction with the causal models of social history19 and a
welcome weakening of disciplinary boundaries between literature and history,
encouraged the dissemination of a dilute version of the ideas. Antiessentialism
became a mantra among many historians who, while they might disagree about
the building blocks of selfhood, were unanimous in their commitment to the
social and/or discursive (the distinction between these often blurred) construc-
tion of subjectivity. There were dissentient voices, louder in recent years, but by
end of the twentieth century most historians concerned with past subjectivities
treated the historically constituted self as an orthodoxy.20
How did modernity’s most influential alternative account of subjectivity,
psychoanalysis, fit into all this? As the twentieth century’s foremost prophet
of the decentered self, Freud would appear an obvious postmodern hero, and
indeed his early readers, encountering an unconscious self within the self, a
hidden world of desire and fantasy, were shocked and titillated. But by the late
twentieth century the shock had worn off, and Freud was castigated for per-
petuating the myth of an “interiorised subjectivity,” a “deep self” propelled
by inner drives rather than by power relations. Foucault’s critique of psychoa-
nalysis as an instrument of subjectivation, part of a coercive “sexual appara-
tus” molding psychosexual identity, was embraced by many.21 Meanwhile
however, Foucault’s fellow new-wave philosophe, Jacques Lacan, with his lin-
guistically determined unconscious, was perceived to be taking Freudianism
in a more progressive direction. By the early 1980s Lacanianism had become
the acceptable postmodern face of psychoanalysis with most other varieties
of post-Freudian theory condemned as normalizing and essentialist.22
For historians, this hostility to psychoanalysis was hardly novel.
Psychoanalytic theory has never achieved more than a toehold in academic
history. After a brief surge of popularity in 1950s and 1960s America (where
in 1957 the president of the American Historical Association used his inau-
gural address to urge American historians to think psychoanalytically)
psychoanalytical history faded to the intellectual periphery; in Britain it
never even reached the periphery. While literary scholars might go in for
oedipus-spotting, or anthropologists anatomize unconscious mythemes,
historians reasserted their allegiance to the observable facts.23 The arrival of
Foucault and his followers on the history scene in the 1980s, while it shook
this old-school empiricism, merely reinforced the antipsychoanalytic posi-
tion, lending it a new vocabulary and modishness. And this despite the fact,
as I have indicated, that one of the chief—and certainly the most exciting—
consequences of the cultural turn was an invasion of psychoanalysis’s natu-
ral terrain, as new-wave historians turned their attention to sexuality, ritual,
transformations in intimate life, and emotional experience. Enriched by

insights from cognate disciplines—especially literary theory but also anthro-
pology, philosophy, sociology—the new cultural history set out to explore
inner life, the deep waters of human nature, while declaring “the subject”
officially dead.24 But subjectivity, as Stephen Greenblatt once noticed with
some embarrassment, tends to “cling” on, even in its most convinced critics,
long after pronouncements of its demise.25
All historians work with some notion of the human psyche. Motives are
attributed, passions invoked, purposes—conscious or unconscious—assumed.
Psychological folk wisdom (often Freudian-tinged) provides some of these
interpretations, while unexamined identifications supply the rest. But the
makeshift, tacit way that this happens militates against explicit consideration
of the psychological processes involved, while the constructionist paradigm
tends to rule any such considerations out of court. In the rest of this chapter
I aim to show how this implicit reliance on psychological categories by his-
torians of all stripes illuminates a core feature of the historical imagination:
its grounding in an empathic connection between the historian and her sub-
jects—a connection made possible by the species similarity between human
subjectivities across place and time.
Empathy is an up-close experience, an imaginative act involving a transi-
tion from an initial sense of difference and distance (past individuals per-
ceived as radically different from oneself, the past as a “foreign country”)
to a sense of recognition and proximity. This up-closeness is far from a new
element in history writing. The desire to draw the past into the present, to
“bring the distant near,” as Thomas Babington Macaulay put it, has long
been a key element of what Mark Salber Phillips describes as the “plastici-
ties of distance/proximity” in history writing.26 In a series of compelling
essays on historical distance, Phillips has analyzed the “push and pull” effect
exerted on history writing by changing historiographical fashions, but also
by the “emotional experience” of the individual historian, as she positions
herself in relation to her subjects, in line with her professional training,
her accumulated evidence, and her affective and ideological “investments.”27
The perils involved in this positioning, discussed later, have been much
rehearsed, but most historians concede that empathy plays a role, if a lim-
ited one, in their work. However, for historians committed to social con-
structionism, empathic relations between present and past individuals are
theoretically impossible, as there is no shared subjectivity on which such
connections can be grounded.28 Can there be a credible, intellectually pro-
ductive proximity between the historian and her subjects? This is an impor-
tant question, not just for practicing historians but for all concerned with
understanding the past.
* * *
Empathy as a historical method has a long and checkered history.29 Many

nineteenth-century historians, reacting against the generalizing philosophic
ambitions of Enlightenment historians, “cultivated a view of historical
200 Barbara Taylor
understanding that stressed the need for empathic absorption in the materials
of the past.”30 Macaulay’s famous call “to make the past present” by imagi-
natively resurrecting historical subjects in all their rich particularity (“their
peculiarities of language, manners and garb . . . their old-fashioned ward-
robes . . . [and] ponderous furniture”) was paradigmatic of a romantic histori-
cism which in the late nineteenth century became linked to the hermeneutic
philosophical tradition to generate a concept of historical knowledge based on
empathic understanding (Verstehen).31 Natural phenomena could be under-
stood externally, through empirical observation, but human experience,
it was argued, could only be comprehended from within, by imaginatively
reentering the mental worlds of past actors: empathy [Einfühlung] was the sole
and unique route to historical knowledge.32 In the English-speaking world,
the most influential proponent of this position was the idealist philosopher
R. G. Collingwood, who in his posthumously published Idea of History (1946)
insisted that to understand a past human action required the historian to
“think over again for himself” the thought behind the act, utilizing his own
reflective capacities. The past is never a “given fact,” which the historian “can
apprehend empirically,” but an inference based on the “re-enactment” of past
thoughts:
The historian of politics or warfare, presented with an account of certain

actions by Julius Caesar, tries to understand these actions, that is, to dis-
cover what thoughts in Caesar’s mind determined him to do them. This
implies . . . thinking for himself what Caesar thought about the situation
and possible ways of dealing with it. The history of thought, and there-
fore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own
mind.33
Historical consciousness, Collingwood concluded, is inherently and necessar-

ily subjective, “reveal[ing] to the historian the powers of his own mind.”34
Today, Collingwood’s notion of historical consciousness looks rather
prim.35 The objects of historical enquiry, he insists, are rational cogita-
tions only; anything else that people find knocking about in their minds—
“irrational elements, impulses and appetites”—belong to man’s “animal
nature” and therefore lie outside history. “They are the blind forces and
activities in us which are part of human life . . . but not parts of the historical
process: sensation as distinct from thought, feelings as distinct from concep-
tions, appetites as distinct from will.”36 Collingwood’s collective term for
these forces was “psyche,” the “subject-matter of psychology”—a lower-order
discipline whose scientific pretensions he fiercely criticized.37 Collingwood
was fascinated by psychoanalysis (to the extent that in 1937 he underwent
50 psychoanalytic sessions) and deeply impressed by Freud—“one of the
greatest men of our age.”38 But his equation of meaningful behavior with
deliberative intentionality ruled out desire and fantasy as fields of histori-
cal investigation, and made historical understanding39 (in theory at least) a
wholly cerebral activity.40
Thought reenactment is possible, Collingwood averred, because reasoning

processes are universal; feelings and sensations, on the other hand, are imme-
diate, particular, and unrepeatable. The “emotional heat” that accompanies
actions can never be refelt by the historian,41 nor can she relive the memories
or perceptions of her subjects, as these are governed by “unconscious . . . habits
of thoughts,” which are irremediably subjective.42 Yet the possibility that such
“unconscious habits of thought” had an underlying logic was not entirely lost
on Collingwood, who in his Principles of Art made striking use of Freud’s con-
cept of projective identification,43 and who toward the end of his life boasted
that he was “on good terms with my own unconscious.”44 But whereas his
philosophical master, Wilhelm Dilthey, had at one time written of historical
empathy in proto-psychoanalytic terms (as an “inner reliving” based on “imi-
tation or identification”)45 Collingwood kept his psychoanalytic sympathies
firmly apart from his historical epistemology.
What do we find if we turn to psychoanalytic theory itself for an alterna-
tive account of historical empathy?
Empathy features throughout the psychoanalytical literature. Freud, in
his Group Psychology, described it as “the mechanism by means of which we
are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life,” and
referred to it regularly in his discussions of analytic technique.46 An interest-
ing 1928 exchange between Freud and the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi
concluded that analytic empathy needed to have a strong intellectual dimen-
sion if it were to be interpretively useful. “The analyst’s empathy dare not
take place in his unconscious, but in his preconscious,” Ferenczi wrote and
Freud agreed, while at the same time endorsing the intuitive, affective ele-
ments of the empathic experience.47 The difficulties of empathic understand-
ing across a wide cultural distance were also discussed by Freud, in a passage
that could as well apply to long-dead historical subjects as to the children and
“primitive” peoples to whom it in fact refers: “[I]t is not easy to feel one’s way
into primitive modes of thinking. We misunderstand primitive men just as
easily as we do children, and we are always apt to interpret their actions and
feelings according to our own mental constellations.”48
Post-Freudian psychoanalytic writings are similarly peppered with ref-
erences to empathy (understood in diverse ways, depending on the psy-
choanalytic school to which the writer belongs), and some present-day
psychoanalysts, notably Heinz Kohut, assign it a foremost place in the ana-
lytic process.49 “[T]he main facts of human life,” the leading British psycho-
analyst Marion Milner wrote in On Not Being Able to Paint,
are living facts, people, living particular wholes existing in their

own particular identity. And particular wholes can never be appre-
hended . . . by . . . analytic reasoning alone; it requires the . . . spreading of
one’s own identity. . . . [T]o “realise” other people, to make them and their
uniqueness fully real to oneself, one has in a sense to put oneself into the
other, to temporarily undo the separation between self and other that one
has so laboriously achieved.50
202 Barbara Taylor
For psychoanalysts like Milner and Kohut, it is of course empathy between

living persons that is of primary concern, which makes their ideas a compli-
cated resource for the historian. An empathic response to a person capable of
responding back is very different from an empathic connection to the long
dead. Yet all relationships—with the living as well as the dead—are mediated
by desire and fantasy; all run the hazard of “interpreting the actions and
feelings [of others] according to our own mental constellations.” The iden-
tifications—conscious and unconscious, positive and negative—that shape
the empathic imagination always risk obliterating the boundary between
self and other, turning “s/he” into a mere simulacrum of “me,” a projection
of my inner world. History everywhere shows us this. Even the very notion
of the “primitive,” as Freud and other fin-de-siècle thinkers employed it, was
basically a projection of repudiated aspects of the “civilized” European self
onto some non-European societies. Psychoanalysts are trained to recognize
such identifications and projections (whether they actually do so is of course
another matter), but most historians are not. And the perils of empathy as
employed by historians have been widely rehearsed, most recently in rela-
tion to the Holocaust where problems of “over-identification” and “illusory
comprehension” are said to be “endemic.”51 What kind of empathy is pos-
sible between a twenty-first-century historian, safely ensconced in front of
her computer, and an Auschwitz prisoner, or a prison guard for that matter?
The question highlights issues at the heart of current debates about historical
subjectivity.
Carolyn Dean, author of The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (2005),
is one of many scholars to attack what she describes as the “lazy and false
empathy” marring much recent Holocaust history. The notion that a better
understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust is achieved by imagining one-
self as a Jew or gypsy in Nazi-occupied Europe “entails obliterating boundaries
between self and other in order to take the victim’s place—a reductio ad absur-
dum of empathic logic in which the imagination absorbs and thus annihilates
what it contemplates.”52 The problem, Dean argues, is particularly acute in
popular historical representations such as those to be found in the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where visitors are asked to “become”
genocide victims by carrying identity cards bearing the names and profiles
of actual Auschwitz prisoners.53 But it is evident also in some scholarly works,
such as Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which
seeks to induce in its readers an empathic identification not just with the vic-
tims of the Holocaust but, Dean claims, with its perpetrators (via lurid perpe-
trators’ eye-views of its abominations that she, in common with other critics,
damns as “pornographic”54). Other varieties of Holocaust representation are
similarly condemned for substituting “disingenuous empathy” for a properly
contextual historical analysis. Dean quotes the historian Michael Geyer: “it
requires learning to see through the eyes of others.”55
The strictures (which echo similar criticisms of historical representations of
slavery56) are cogent. But Dean offers no account of the psychological dynam-
ics of empathy, and seems to assume that any appeal to common human
experience is ethically hazardous. She cites approvingly those who argue

(in standard postmodern vein) that “empathic identification” relies on an
“Enlightenment universalism” that represses human difference and so serves
as a “disguised form of hegemony” for dominant groups.57 There is a sugges-
tion—as in the quote from Geyer—that better forms of empathy are possible,
but on what basis is not explained. However, here another critical commen-
tator on Holocaust history, Dominick LaCapra, has moved the discussion
further forward. Writing about the relationship between the Holocaust his-
torian and Holocaust victims, LaCapra distinguishes between what he calls
“incorporative empathy”—the variety that Dean and others condemn—and
an “unsettled empathy” that respects self/other boundaries.
Empathy, as I have construed the term, is to be disengaged from its tradi-

tional insertion in a binary logic of identity and difference. In terms of this
questionable logic, empathy is mistakenly conflated with identification or
fusion with the other . . . [whereas] empathy should rather be understood in
terms of an affective relation, rapport or bond with the other recognised
and respected as such.58
The distinction outlined here is ethically motivated. Like Carolyn Dean,

LaCapra is sharply condemnatory of what, in his 2004 History in Transit, he
dubs “vicarious victimhood.” History in Transit, an extended meditation on his-
torical writing about traumatic suffering, draws a sharp contrast between bad
empathy which, operating through “incorporative or projective identification,”
affords the empathizer a sanitized, even scintillating experience of victimhood
while at the same time effectively obliterating the actual sufferer, and good
empathy, which “takes one out of oneself toward the other without eliminating
or assimilating the difference or alterity.”59 The latter is dubbed “heteropathic
empathy,” in order to underline its proper combination of similarity and dif-
ference. Both varieties of empathy—the incorporative and the heteropathic—
are distinguished from sympathy, which LaCapra, in line with standard usage,
depicts as a detached emotive response in a hierarchical register.60
LaCapra’s project here, to valorize empathy as a moral and historiographi-
cal strategy while avoiding its ethical pitfalls, is certainly commendable. But
the psychology behind it is muddy. LaCapra uses psychoanalytic terminol-
ogy throughout his work, yet his account of subjectivity in History in Transit
appears to be in terms of culturally constituted subject positions.61 The ten-
sion between these two approaches goes unacknowledged. Psychoanalytic
theory is humanist and transhistorical, and preoccupied with the operations
of unconscious fantasy. LaCapra, in common with other poststructuralists,
is antihumanist and historicist (and he has little to say about fantasy). But is
it really possible for one historically constructed subject-position-holder to
empathize with another? The affective proximity LaCapra advocates appears
to be precluded by his constructivist assumptions.
Historians who dismiss empathy usually do so for one, or both, of two
reasons: the presumption of an unbridgeable gap between present and past
204 Barbara Taylor
socially constituted subjectivities, and the suspicion that “empathy” denotes

nothing more than the historian’s own attitudes and concerns projected onto
her subjects, to produce an illusion of empathic comprehension, Dean’s “lazy
and false empathy.” The dangers of such a self-centered empathy are obvious,
but are they inevitable? LaCapra doesn’t think so, but his call for an “unset-
tled” empathy that would permit an “affective relation” between past and
present selves without merging the former into the latter is not supported
by any account of the psychological processes that would make this possible.
The postwar British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott provided the begin-
nings of such an account in his theory of cultural activity as empathic play.
Winnicott, whose career is discussed in chapter 7, was a master inter-
preter of childhood development and its psycho-cultural effects. In his
schema, empathy—the ability “to enter imaginatively and accurately into
the thoughts and hopes and fears of another person”62 —is a maturational
achievement. A newborn infant, according to Winnicott, is not empathic
(although his mother needs to be). Psychologically, a neonate is a mother/
baby unity without self/other boundaries, an umbilical entity wielding abso-
lute control over his world (“in the beginning one’s mother is, literally, the
whole world”63). The undoing of this infantile omnipotence is the psychic
change that leads to the emergence of empathy. The inevitable occasional
frustration of baby’s needs by mother, and the rage and aggression that follow,
are met—in “good-enough” parenting—with stoical survival on the mother’s
part. Over time, this dynamic of destructive aggression and survival leads to a
differentiation between mother and child: from having been a wholly subjec-
tive object, part of baby, mother gradually becomes part of external reality.
Ambivalence emerges, and guilt at destructive urges, and reparative impulses;
and with these the baby discovers his capacity to gratify his mother, to “con-
tribute” to her. Instead of merely using her as a self-object, the baby begins
to perceive mother as a whole person, a “not-me” figure with feelings and
thoughts of her own, and in this way he acquires the ability to imaginatively
identify with her, “to step into mother’s shoes” as Winnicott puts it.64
This empathic experience is not entirely subjective; nor is it part of external
reality. It occurs rather in that intermediate zone between inner and outer
that Winnicott famously described as the field of play (and also as “cultural
experience”): that is, a creative space where unconscious drives and fantasies
(“the dream”) interweave with external phenomena to produce relational life.
The empathic baby gathers other people into this play zone, populating his
mental world with figures who are simultaneously found and created, that
is, not-me figures who are external to him but invested with personal mean-
ing. This is an exciting emotional experience, but it is also an intellectual
one: the baby becomes a theorist, imagining other people’s states of mind
on the basis of his own, making suppositions, which are then tested and
adjusted. Far from a primitive intuitive response, his empathy is sophisticated
and thoughtful, and it draws him, over time, into a shared cultural world,
a “common pool of humanity” to which all people contribute, “and from
which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find.”65 This inter-
play between finding and contributing is the core of empathy and thus of
sociality; it is also—we may propose, extending Winnicott’s argument—the

basis of historical understanding.
What are historians doing when we engage in historical research? In her
book Dust, Carolyn Steedman argues that we are playing in the Winnicottian
sense, that is, we are simultaneously finding and creating the past by bring-
ing its traces into a mental space that is neither inside nor outside us but
in-between, a play space of historical consciousness where we “discover
somewhere to put what [we] find.”66 Steedman calls this space an “imaginative
realm.” She doesn’t develop this point, but thinking about historical research
as motivated fantasy sharpens the argument. What does the historian aim
to do with the dead people that she studies? Sometimes she wants merely to
use them—to bolster an argument; to enhance her scholarly reputation; to
claim them as allies; to push them around without experiencing retaliation.
But mostly historians aim to contribute to our subjects: to endow them with
fresh vitality by making them intelligible and meaningful to the living. “The
dead,” the historian Frank Manuel wrote in 1971, “ask to be understood,” and
our ambition to meet this demand inclines us toward them (even if we dis-
like them).67 Working alone with their traces, communing with their ghostly
presences, we use all our resources to comprehend our subjects, including our
empathic capabilities.
Historians, we might say, dream about our subjects, that is, our interpre-
tations of past subjectivities draw on our imaginative identifications, con-
scious and unconscious, with the people we study. This empathic experience,
I have proposed, is not optional; without it, history writing is impossible. The
hazards—of substituting our own mental states for those of past actors; of
neglecting the historically specific elements in subjectivity; of generating a
false sense of contemporaneousness—are obvious and important. As an imag-
inative historical activity, empathy, as Marion Milner and Winnicott describe
it, has clear limitations. All human beings fantasize, but the contents of these
fantasies change over time: the unconscious too has a historical dimension.68
The fact that all human beings are sufficiently alike psychologically to make
empathy possible is no guarantee against incomprehension or, worse, what
the psychoanalytically inclined historian Jean Starobinski condemns as the
“creation of a false past out of the present” resulting from “attributing . . . our
own emotional states” to the long dead.69
Empathy then must sometimes fail, and even at its strongest it does not
preclude critical judgment (empathizing with someone doesn’t automatically
entail approving of them). Like other acts of the scholarly imagination, empa-
thy occurs in what philosophers of science call the context of discovery, that
is, the field of hypothesis formation as distinct from the field of hypothesis
verification. Its results therefore are speculative, but also reflective and testa-
ble against the evidence. Historical subjects cannot be understood in isolation
from their social worlds; the cultural anchoring of subjectivity precludes any
easy “meeting of minds” across time. But the antihumanist argument that
past selves are so remote from us, in their culturally constructed contingen-
cies, as to make such meetings impossible, seems to me untenable. Of course
we can never reexperience life as it was lived by past individuals. But what is
206 Barbara Taylor
achievable, indeed unavoidable, is what Starobinski describes as the “critical

relation” between the historian and her subjects, produced by the “ceaseless
movement” between “intuitive identification” and a “panoramic view of the
context and cultural patterns” in which these subjects were embedded.70 In
a famous essay on the history of nostalgia, Starobinski insisted that “we can
never recapture the subjective experiences of eighteenth-century man as they
were. We can only try not to attribute our problems and our “complexes” to
him too unknowingly.”71 And here perhaps is the nub. For knowing enough
about our own “complexes” to avoid unconsciously projecting them onto our
subjects entails a level of self-awareness that is seldom demanded of histori-
ans. But if, as I have argued, empathy with our subjects is, at least to some
extent, inevitable, then perhaps a modicum of such self-awareness is just
what is needed—alongside an acknowledgment (contra Foucault and his dis-
ciples) that “complexes,” that is, conscious and unconscious drives and fan-
tasies, “mental constellations” in Freud’s phrase, are no invention of Western
modernity but vital forces shaping our common humanity.
Notes
This chapter is based on a paper delivered to the symposium, “Historical Distance and the
Shaping of the Past,” Kings College London, June 26–27, 2009. My thanks to the organizers
of this event for the invitation to participate. My thanks also to Sally Alexander, Lyndal
Roper, Lynne Segal, Cora Kaplan, Catherine Hall, Bill Schwarz, and Kate Soper for helpful
comments and friendly criticism (which I didn’t always heed).
1. References to individual works are given here; for an overview of the field in the late
1990s, see Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present
(London: Routledge, 1997).
2. The “self” that is the object of the historiography is, however, far from clearly defined,
partly for the reasons that I explore here. For a useful discussion of this in relation to
recent histories of selfhood during the Enlightenment and revolutionary period, see
Gregory S. Brown, “Am ‘I’ a ‘Post-Revolutionary Self,’” History and Theory 47 (2008),
229–248.
3. I am here reproducing a summary account of the arguments that I made in “Separations
of Soul: Solitude, Biography, History,” American Historical Review 114.3 (2009),
640–651.
4. The story is told in scores of books and articles; for summary statements of it, see
M. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self (London: Polity Press, 1997), 14–24; Dror
Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England
(New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2004), xi–xviii; Nikolas Rose, “Assembling the
Self,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present
(London: Routledge, 1997), 224–248. Charles Taylor’s monumental Sources of the Self:
The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) is also a
history of the cultural formation of the psychological self, although in this case with
origins stretching back to Augustine and neo-Platonism.
5. Linda Orr, “Intimate Images: Subjectivity and History—Staël, Michelet and Tocqueville,”
in Frank Ankersmit and Hans Keller, eds., A New Philosophy of History (London: Reaktion
Books, 1995), 106.
6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), 387.
7. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 49; Jacques
Derrida, “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida, ed., Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15; J. Seigel, The Idea of the Self (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 631–650. Later Derrida revised his views some-
what, cautioning that it might not be possible to dispense with a residual subject; see
“‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in
E. Cadava, ed., Who Comes after the Subject? (London: Routledge, 1991), 96–119.
8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4, 256.
9. Rose, “Assembling the Self,” 226.
10. John Toews, “Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in History,” in N. J. Smelser and
P. B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Oxford:
Elsevier Science Ltd, 2001), vol. 13, 8920. As Patrick Joyce puts it, “Meanings make
subjects and not subjects meanings.” (Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in
Nineteenth-Century England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 13).
11. For the elision between the linguistic turn and the cultural turn, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel,
ed., “Introduction,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the
Linguistic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8. This volume is a very useful collection of
articles by some of the key proponents and critics of the linguistic turn.
12. Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 83.
13. Spiegel, “Introduction,” 11. Two of the most influential proponents of this position
have been the US-based French historian Joan Scott (her “The Evidence of Experience”
is reprinted in Spiegel, Practicing History, 199–216) and, in Britain, Patrick Joyce
(Democratic Subjects). Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class: Studies in English
Working-Class History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) was also influen-
tial, although the case for the linguistic turn presented by Stedman Jones differed in
important respects from that of Scott and Joyce.
14. For a discussion of Foucauldianism as a revamped social determinism, see Gareth
Stedman Jones, “The Determinist Fix,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), 19–35.
15. Joan W. Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Joan W. Scott,
ed., Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165.
16. For a thoughtful discussion of the politics of the linguistic turn, see Geoff Eley, A
Crooked Line. From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2005), chapter 4 (“Reflectiveness”).
17. Writing about the idea of the “private self,” the British Foucualdian Nikolas Rose
explained that there could be no “form of subjectivity outside power which can serve
as the basis of evaluation and critique of the effects of power on the subjectivities we
have” (Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self [London: Free Association Books,
1989, 1999 edn.], x); or as Rose’s fellow Foucauldian Patrick Joyce put it, “[T]here is . . . no
place to go which is innocent of power” (Joyce, front matter to Rose, Governing the Soul ).
Foucault made a famous “return to the subject” in the final decades of his life, although
the significance of this shift is much debated (Seigel, Idea of the Self, 621–631).
18. The essays collected in Spiegel, Practicing History, give the flavor of the arguments, while
Spiegel’s “Introduction” provides a thoughtful assessment of their long-term significance.
For a lively expression of regret for the fading of these intellectual passions, see Susan
Pederson, “Festschriftiness,” London Review of Books 33.19 (October 6, 2011), 31–32.
19. Spiegel, “Introduction,” 8.
20. A key dissenting voice has been that of Lynn Hunt, who criticizes the linguistic/cultural
turn for having “effaced” subjectivity “as a meaningful conceptual category”: “[T]he self
has been reduced to an entirely constructed, and therefore empty and wholly plastic,
nodal point in a discursive or cultural system. Since poststructuralists and postmod-
ernists have celebrated the ‘death of the subject’ they have left little in the self to resist
social or cultural determinations” (Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,”
in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture [University
of California Press, 1999], 22). Hunt is a proponent of psychoanalytical history, but
many historians who are not have also criticized constructionist views of the self for
obliterating personal agency: David Gary Shaw, e.g., writes that “the self as articulated
in much [poststructuralist] historical theory is so divested of autonomy and control
208 Barbara Taylor
that it can’t really operate as a cause, an agent . . . ” (“Happy in our Chains?,” History and
Theory 40 (2001), 4).
21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1975). For an insightful discussion of Foucault’s complex relationship
with psychoanalysis, see Joel Whitebrook, “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with
Psychoanalysis,” in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 312–347.
22. By “Lacanianism” I am here referring not just to the work of Jacques Lacan but to the
many varieties of poststructuralist French psychoanalytic thought, all of them strongly
influenced by Lacan, that came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s. The relationship
between Freudian psychoanalysis, Foucauldianism, and Lacanianism is so complex
that it has given employment to a veritable army of scholars, whose publications are
so many and diverse that selecting a “representative” sample is not possible. However,
those wishing to know more might consult Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration:
Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso Press, 1987);
David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso Press, 1988); Peter Starr, Logics of Failed
Revolt: French Theory after May 1968 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Company: A History of Psychoanalysis in France,
1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).
23. Lynn Hunt, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” in Lloyd Cramer
and Sara Mazah, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), 337–356; Daniel Pick, “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture,” in David
Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 210–236; Peter Burke, “Freud and
Cultural History,” Psychoanalysis and History 9.1 (2007), 50–15.
24. In 2009 Carolyn Bynum offered a typically thoughtful, upbeat account of these develop-
ments in the history trade (“Perspectives, Connections and Objects: What’s Happening
in History Now?,” Daedalus 138 [1] [2009], 71–87).
25. Greenblatt, “Epilogue,” Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 255–257.
26. Mark Salber Phillips, “Rethinking Historical Distance: from Doctrine to Heuristic,”
History and Theory 50 (December 2011), 11.
27. Ibid., 11–23. See also Mark Salber Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation.”
History Workshop Journal 57 (2004), 123–41; Mark Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life”. History Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 49–64.
28. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), 39–47.
29. The most lively debates around the historical uses of empathy, in recent decades, have
occurred in the context of the teaching of history in schools. I do not discuss these
debates here as the pedagogical issues involved are beyond the scope of this chapter,
but for some interesting contributions, see A. K. Dickinson, P. J. Lee, and P. J. Rogers,
eds., Learning History (London: Heinemann, 1984); and Richard Harris and Lorraine
Foreman-Peck, “Stepping into Other People’s Shoes: Teaching and Assessing Empathy in
the Secondary History Curriculum,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching
and Research 4.2 (2004), 1–14.
30. Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” 132.
31. Ibid., 135; Karsten R. Stueber, “Empathy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy; Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of
Empathy,” in N. Eisenberg and J. Strayer, eds., Empathy and Its Development (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25–32; Samuel Moyn, “Empathy in History,
Empathizing with Humanity,” History and Theory 45 (2006), 397–415.
32. George Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical
Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: revised edn 1983); Karsten R. Stueber,
Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006), 10–15.
33. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), 215.
34. Ibid., 218.
35. Arnold Toynbee complained that Collingwood’s brand of history “squeezes out the emo-
tions” (Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History [London: Routledge,
2000], 41).
36. Collingwood, Idea of History, 231.
37. Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R G Collingwood (New Haven, CN: Princeton
38. At the time that he was undergoing analysis, Collingwood was also annotating Freud’s
Totem and Taboo “with great dash” (Inglis, History Man, 221).
39. Collingwood did not use the term “empathy,” possibly because of its affective connota-
tions.
40. In fact, as Peter Loewenberg has pointed out, Collingwood’s examples of thought
reenactment made many references to the use of the imagination (Peter Loewenberg,
“Cultural History and Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalysis and History 9[1] [2007], 21).
41. Collingwood, Idea of History, 446–447.
42. Ibid., 307–308.
43. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 218.
44. Inglis, History Man, 305.
45. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 11.
46. Freud’s first use of Einfühlung was in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where he
used it to adumbrate a theory of comedy based on an “inner imitation” of the humor-
ous responses of others; he later went on to describe empathy between the analyst and
analysand as the precondition for an effective psychoanalytic treatment (George W.
Pigman, “Freud and the History of Empathy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76
[1995], 244–246).
47. Pigman, “Freud,” 247.
48. Ibid., 248.
49. Heinz Kohut, The Search for the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1991).
50. Joanna Field [Marion Milner], On Not Being Able to Paint (Los Angeles: Jeremy P Tarcher
Inc, 1957), 84, 143–144.
51. Lewis Ward, “Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of
Transgenerational Empathy,” DPhil dissertation, University of Exeter, 2008, 59, 61.
52. Carolyn Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004), 9–10.
53. Ibid., 9.
54. Ibid., 50–51.
55. Ibid., 15.
56. S. V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17–23.
57. Dean, Fragility, 11.
58. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
59. Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity and Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2004), 76.
60. In fact, as Samuel Moyn points out (“Empathy in History,” 398–399), Dean and
LaCapra’s “empathy” is more like “sympathy” in its eighteenth-century formulations
than “empathy” as conceived by the empathy pioneers of the late nineteenth to early
twentieth century.
61. I say “appears to be” because his discussion of subjectivity is exceptionally hard to fol-
low. John Toews, in his review of the book for the Journal of Modern History (78[3] [2006],
684–686), also remarks on this lack of clarity.
62. Donald Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1986), 117.
63. Field [Milner], Not Being Able to Paint, 116.
64. Donald Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965;
London: Karnac Books, 2007), 90. See also Arne Johan Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and
Judgement (Penn: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), for an account of empathy as
210 Barbara Taylor
the basis of moral judgment, which utilizes Winnicott’s ideas along with other psycho-
analytic theorists. Today empathy has moved into the sphere of “social neuroscience,”
with many researchers exploring the neurological basis of other-oriented emotions (see
Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy [Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 2009]).
65. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 116;
author’s italics.
66. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 82; author’s
italics.
67. Frank E. Manuel, “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” Daedalus 100.1 (1971),
222. Manuel’s essay is a thoughtful and provocative investigation into the uses of psy-
chology in history since the eighteenth century; the words here quoted are extracted
from the following observation: “Classical psychoanalysis, with a dubious future as
a therapy, might be reborn as a historical instrumentality. The dead do not ask to be
cured, only to be understood.”
68. The historical dimension of the unconscious mind is perhaps best understood by con-
sidering dreams. Dream content (the “dream thoughts,” both manifest and latent) is
certainly influenced by the dreamer’s historical circumstances as well as by a wide
range of other internal and external factors. On the other hand, the processes involved
in dreaming (the “dream work”) are transhistorical psychological mechanisms (the
same distinction pertains to fantasy in a waking state).
69. Jean Starobinksi, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14 (1966), 83.
70. Fernando Vidal, “Jean Starobinski: the History of Psychiatry as the Cultural History of
Consciousness,” in Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, eds., Discovering the History of Psychiatry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 144. In a fascinating essay on the relationship
between subjectivity and historical understanding in the work of Staël, Michelet, and
Tocqueville, Linda Orr describes this ceaseless movement between the historian and
his/her historical subjects as a “constantly renegotiated, painfully critical, passionate
exchange,” a “self-searching” that becomes a source of historical insight. Orr notes the
strong anxiety this arouses in many present-day historians, who fear the charge of sub-
jectivism, and against this fear she quotes Michelet: “The historian who . . . undertakes to
erase himself while writing. . . . is not a historian at all” (Orr, “Intimate Images,” 106–107).
71. Starobinski, “Nostalgia,” 83.
10
Keeping Our Distance
Adam Phillips
It may be all right morally but there is a serious and rather ordinarily
mysterious sense in which life in the present is constantly in thrall
to its ever-ongoing outcomes and is continually reshaped, too late,
by what contingently it leads to.
—Philip Davis, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters1
When the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote,

in 1959, that “the psychoanalyst can be looked upon . . . as a specialist in
history-taking,” and went on to say that “this history-taking is a very involved
process,” he was saying several things at once, some startling and some not,
and some perhaps of interest to the historian as well as to the psychoanalyst.2
The traditional history-taking of the medical specialist involves the asking
and the answering of a series of pertinent questions with a view to appropri-
ate treatment. The purpose of this oral history, which then becomes written
history in the form of the patient’s “notes,” is clear: it doesn’t, as a psychoa-
nalysis sometimes does, take many years, and it doesn’t include the prescrip-
tion that the patient should say whatever comes into his head, without regard
for narrative coherence. And, of course, in medicine history-taking is a prel-
ude to and a precondition of the treatment. What Winnicott was saying was
that the psychoanalyst was a specialist in history-taking because the treat-
ment of psychoanalysis was an extended history-taking. The history-taking—
that becomes, of course, a history remaking—is the treatment. The question
then becomes—and it was a question not initiated by Freud, but followed up
by Freud from a confluence of selected nineteenth-century historiography
and the then contemporary psychiatry—what is it that history-taking treats?
And how does the taking and making of history work, involving as it does in
psychoanalysis the making (and breaking) of links between the past and the
present?
211
212 Adam Phillips
Winnicott was a great believer in going the distance with the patient,
which meant creating a setting in which the so-called patient could tell her
story, which was a history, in a self-curative way. “How much of the patient’s
difficulties,” he asked in a talk of 1961,
belong simply to the fact that no-one has ever interestingly listened? I very
quickly discovered as long as forty years ago that the taking of case-his-
tories for mothers is in itself psychotherapy if it be well done. Time must
be allowed and a non-moralistic attitude naturally adopted, and when the
mother has come to the end of saying what is in her mind, she may add:
now I understand the present symptoms fit in to the whole pattern of the
child’s life in the family, and I can manage now, simply because you let
me get at the whole story in my own way and in my own time. This is not
only a matter that concerns parents who bring their children. Adults say
this about themselves, and psychoanalysis could be said to be one long,
very long, history-taking.3
“To make the past present, to make the distant near” (to repeat Thomas
Babington Macaulay’s maxim), at least in therapeutic history-making, requires
that time must be allowed (in both senses) and a nonmoralistic attitude natu-
rally adopted. This history-taking involves two people and is a dialogue of
sorts; it enables the teller, ideally, to get at the whole story in his own way and
time. The history-taking that is psychoanalysis takes a very long time. The
oral-history that is psychoanalytic treatment has within it—within its own
genre—if not its own revelations, at least, occasionally, its own useful disclo-
sures. What precludes effective history-making for the patient is not giving
the story its requisite time—not making time for time, as the Jewish proverb
says—and being preemptively moralistic, that is, censorious of certain roads
the patient is tempted to go down.
History, as the historian Mark Phillips reminds us, invariably involves issues
of distance and proximity. There are, as Phillips says, “a broad range of dis-
tances that structure our engagement with the past”; for “both the historian
and the reader,” he writes—and we can add, for the patient as constructed
by psychoanalysis—“distance is not only a given but also a construction.”4
The modern person, as described by Freud, is an obsessive historian and the
history being made, the story being told, is, in Freud’s words, inaccurate
but sufficient—that is to say, it is in the service of the individual’s psychic
survival. And this survival is only achieved, in Freud’s account, by a person
keeping a certain distance from themselves, a distance not just from their
dangerous desires, but from their histories, which are histories of desire.
These techniques for self-distancing are called defenses because the individ-
ual is deemed to be under attack from within and from without. In this pic-
ture personal history-making is one of the best tools we have for surviving,
which means, for Freud, protecting ourselves as much from ourselves as from
the external world. The Freudian subject is first and foremost a personal his-
torian, preoccupied by keeping his distance; his history is a history of largely
Keeping Our Distance 213
unconscious self-distancings that powerfully reshape his engagement with

any given past. There is the trauma of external event, the trauma of instinc-
tual life, and the trauma of their confluence and enmeshment. It takes a
very long time to take a personal history because much of that history every
individual has done their best not to acknowledge. And as Nietzsche tried
to persuade us in “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” this determined
not-knowing can be a very useful thing. Freud continued Nietzsche’s work
by giving us an account, a repertoire of descriptions of the forms of distanc-
ing we call “forgetting.”
Freud, and his daughter Anna, referred to these distancing techniques
as mechanisms of defense because they were often automatic and uncon-
sciously performed, like a second nature organized to protect a first. This
distancing of desires and feelings and thoughts, and the histories thus con-
stituted, is done without our noticing. At a personal level, one might say,
mechanisms of defense compromise—or even corrupt—the individual’s per-
sonal history-making. Each of Anna Freud’s ten fundamental mechanisms
of defense, “regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing,
projection, introjection, turning against the self and reversal . . . sublimation
or displacement of instinctual aims,” involves transformations of bits of per-
sonal history; ways, as it were, of making personal history viable.5 And each
of these so-called mechanisms in different ways acknowledges something by
distancing it. If, in giving you directions for Oxford, I say “ignore the signs
for Reading,” you can only do this by seeing the signs first; that is how repres-
sion works. So all the mechanisms of defense are forms of distancing that
depend on prior recognitions. To put it as simply as possible: you only dis-
tance something if you can see, or think you can see that it requires distanc-
ing. This of course, is not necessarily relevant to the historian in the archive,
or the records office. Clearly distance from a personal past is of limited use
as an analogy for distance from the other pasts that are the historian’s sub-
ject. Though it might still be assumed that there is an obscure weaving of
the individual historian’s personal past with the history that captures her
imagination; it might, for example, be worth wondering how the individual
historian’s personal defenses work—how they show up and inform the work
for better and for worse—in her research and writing. Whether, for example,
the historian can give himself the time and the moral ambience his work
requires, what his criteria of relevance are, and how they have come about,
what the history is of his sense of what is significant, or pertinent to the story
he wants to tell. And this is also a question about the institutional setting in
which the work takes place (“truth,” Bourdieu writes in History and Truth, “is
the set of representations regarded as true because they are produced accord-
ing to the rules defining the production of truth”6). Clearly, once we recog-
nize, in Mark Phillips’s words, “that all historical representations mediate our
distance from the past, through distances of varying types and degrees,” the
work of the historian and the work of the analyst-and-patient seem to over-
lap in occasionally instructive ways.7 And indeed psychoanalysis, as a social
practice, could be seen as part of a larger history of historical distanciation.
214 Adam Phillips
But personal memory is not archival, and psychoanalytic treatment is only

research in a certain rather limited sense. And yet there is one concept of
Freud’s—it cannot exactly be called a mechanism of defense—that is obvi-
ously pertinent to the reader and writer of history, and that has been particu-
larly useful in the practice of clinical psychoanalysis, and this is the idea of
deferred action (in German, Nachtraglichkeit). This is an idea that was taken
up more in France than anywhere else—there is no entry for it, for example,
in Charles Rycroft’s canonical Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis of 1968—
and so gets its clearest definition in Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of
Psychoanalysis (1967). Deferred action, they write, is
a term frequently used by Freud in connection with his view of psychic tem-
porality and causality: experiences, impressions and memory traces may be
revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment
of a new stage of development. They may at that event be endowed not only
with new meaning but also with psychical effectiveness.8
This is the revisionary history of ordinary individual development in which

the past is recast according to present need or future desire. The past is not
only redescribed, it is rendered effective, or indeed newly effective. Though
deferred action is at the heart of Freud’s famous case history of the Wolfman
there is an early reference, quoted by Laplanche and Pontalis, in Freud’s cor-
respondence with Fleiss. On December 6, 1896, Freud wrote to his collabora-
tor, “I am working on the assumption that our physical mechanism has come
into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form
of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in
accordance with fresh circumstances—to a re-transcription”9 The picture is
of the past, “memory traces” dormant, in abeyance, at a distance until certain
contemporary preoccupations bring it to light, or reignite it. What Freud calls
“fresh circumstances” effectively collapse the distance from the past, which
is no sooner recovered than it is redescribed for present purposes—as though
the past were a store of potential tools dependent on the present for use or
even for formulation. Laplanche and Pontalis give a scrupulously exacting
definition of how Freud’s concept works, which is worth quoting in full. It
needs to be noticed that deferred action does not work, in Freud’s sense of it,
by conscious deliberation, but by unconscious desire. This internal histori-
cal revisionism, in other words, is proceeding despite, or at odds with, the
subject’s conscious intentions. More like dream-work than homework, this
is history-making according to a logic of unconscious idiosyncratic personal
desire; an unofficial or blackmarket history-making and taking. Laplanche
and Pontalis characterize it as follows:
a. it is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision

but, specifically, whatever it has been possible in the first instance to
incorporate fully into a meaningful context. The traumatic event is the
epitome of such unassimilated experience.
b. Deferred revision is occasioned by events and situations, or by an

organic maturation, which allow the subject to gain access to a new
level of meaning and to rework his earlier experiences.
c. Human sexuality, with the peculiar unevenness of its temporal devel-
opment, provides an eminently suitable field for the phenomenon of
deferred action.10
We revise only unassimilated experience; so assimilated experience is

defined, inferentially, as that which does not require redescription. Revision
is in the service of recovery, recuperation, even discovery: if trauma is the
experience we are unable to have, then deferred action is a process of discov-
ering something that has already happened to us, but for the first time. This
makes trauma the stuff of history-making, and revision the sign of trauma.
It also makes the past utterly dependent on the present for its life; if Proust’s
madeleine is one of these events and situations that occasion deferred revi-
sion then the past appears accidentally (or accidentally on purpose one
could say). Like a set of latent energies it is set off, triggered, illuminated
despite ourselves. Sexuality would be the subject par excellence for deferred
action because it is at once inescapable and unassimilable, integral and alien
(for Freud sexuality is by its nature traumatic). But for this potential to be
reawakened also implies that there is a sense in which the past is kept at a
distance—we keep it at a distance—which any moment can be traversed or
reversed. Like our sexual desire—for Freud, effectively the medium of our per-
sonal history—it can be nothing and suddenly something, absent and then
suddenly aroused. The past, at least the personal past, is something that has
to be aroused in us. And it can be aroused, in part, because we are keeping it
at bay, keeping our distance from its more traumatic elements. Freud’s terms
in the letter to Fleiss—“re-arrangement,” “re-transcription”—are suggestive of
a connection (or an analogy) being made with historical writing, with com-
position, with reconstruction.
The English translation, “deferred action,” is misleading, Laplanche
and Pontalis point out, because it implies mere delay, as in deferred grief,
rather than, as it should, a “real working over . . . a work of recollection.”
Nachtraglichkeit describes not a repetition, but a transformation; paradoxically
the experience, the memory-trace, only exists in its transformation. Access is
gained to the past and its “meaning” by reworking; psychically then, there are
no available source materials, only their worked-over and worked-on deriva-
tives. To Burckhardt’s “history is on every occasion the record of that which
one age finds worthy of note in another,” we might add, “personal history is
the record of what any one period in a person’s life finds worthy of note in an
earlier period of his life.” But the noteworthiness is subject to criteria, which
are unconscious. “Distance,” Mark Phillips writes, “has as much to do with
the emotional or political uses of history as with its cognitive functions or
its rhetorical construction.”11 We take our distance according to our projects,
as if we are always asking ourselves what’s the right distance, temporally and
spatially, to get the job done; and, as psychoanalytic subjects, what is the
216 Adam Phillips
right distance we will unconsciously take to pursue the object we uncon-

sciously desire. The uses of history involved in deferred action are, according
to Freud, to do with the incorporation of unassimilated experience, the gain-
ing access to new levels of meaning, and the reworking of earlier experiences.
In deferred action it is the action of regulating distance that is itself revised
in the service of survival and satisfaction. In other words, we have always
already taken our distance. So the psychoanalytic question, which could also
be the historian’s, is not what distance should I take, but what distance have I
already taken? And what will prompt me, wittingly or unwittingly, to change
distance? If, in Mark Phillip’s words, “all historical thought is an effort to
establish meaningful relationships between the lived present and a selected
past,”12 then Freud is urging us to notice—as his contribution to historiog-
raphy—where, in historical thought, effort is not required, where and when
meaningful relationships between the lived present and a selected past hap-
pen in spite of us. And he also wants us to see what it might be about this
lived present that reawakens, that makes us select, this particular bit of the
past. If we use the voluntaristic, pragmatic language of Nietzsche’s famous
title “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” then psychoanalysis is about
how the modern individual uses his past to impoverish his present, uses his
history to abuse himself. In the language of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis
is about how the individual is unconsciously driven to keep his distance from
certain aspects of his past (or to make that distance as right for him as he
can: all sexual fantasy is fantasy in which the distances are just right for the
requisite satisfactions; the object of desire is always imagined in terms of, and
is defined by, its temporal and spatial distance).
The rhetorical strategies of distanciation in the writing of history, differ-
ing over time, are clearly related to and inform the modern individual’s per-
sonal history-making that Freud accounted for as primarily self-protective.
For Freud, all personal history is defensive history, and all defensive behavior
is distance regulation. In the light of Mark Phillips’s work we might see psy-
choanalysis as a study of what he calls “the overlapping and competing forms
of past description,” but within the modern individual; and psychoanalytic
treatment as an attempt to understand the mediations of distance that con-
stitute the individual’s history.
“Historical arguments,” Raymond Guess writes in Philosophy and Real
Politics,
are not in the first instance intended to support or refute a thesis; rather
they aim to change the structure of argument by directing attention to
a new set of relevant questions that need to be asked. They are contribu-
tions not to finding out whether this or that argument is invalid or poorly
supported, but to trying to change the questions people ask about con-
cepts and arguments. One of the effects that one type of historical account
ought to have is that of causing it to seem naïve or “un-philosophical”
simply to make a certain set of assumptions.13
Psychoanalysis is an historical account of the individual, and the histori-

cal arguments in which it involves us change, among many other things,
the questions we might ask about what Mark Phillips calls “the fundamental
dimensions of distance that . . . structure our complex relations to the past.”14
Psychoanalysis—and not only psychoanalysis of course—makes it naïve
to assume that we can get our distancing right. In relation to an object of
desire—a person, an ideology, a trauma, a historical period—distancing is
always an experiment. In psychoanalytic language, people suffer most from
living at fixed distances from the things and people that matter most to them.
Both psychoanalysis and historiography—and psychoanalysis as historiogra-
phy—show us what is at stake in keeping our distance.
Notes
This chapter is based on a paper delivered to the symposium “Historical Distance and the
Shaping of the Past,” Kings College London, June 26–27, 2009. My thanks to the organizers
of this event for inviting me to participate.
1. Philip Davis, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), 8.
2. Donald Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London:
Hogarth Press, 1965), 132.
3. Donald Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency (London: Tavistock Publications, 1984),
233.
4. Mark Phillips, “Rethinking Historical Distance,” paper delivered to the symposium,
“Historical Distance and the Shaping of the Past,” Kings College London, June 26–27,
2009. The proceedings of this conference appear in Mark Salber Phillips, Barbara
Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas, eds., Rethinking Historical Distance: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective (London: Palgrave, 2012). Mark Phillips, Bringing the Distant Near; Historical
Distance in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Twentieth Century is forthcoming
with Yale University Press.
5. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London: Hogarth Press, 1937), 47.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004), 73.
7. Ibid., 7.
8. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 111.
9. Ibid., 112.
10. Ibid.
11. Phillips, “Rethinking Historical Distance,” 11.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Raymond Guess, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2008), 68.
14. Phillips, “Rethinking Historical Distance,” 13.
11
The Seven-Headed Monster:
Luther and Psychology
Lyndal Roper
In the autumn of 2010 in Wittenberg, Luther was literally unavoidable. The

town’s nineteenth-century statue of Luther with its Schinkel pedestal was
taken out of service for cleaning—and was replaced by hundreds of meter-high
plastic Luthers, all in rows. This was an art installation by the artist Ottmar
Hoerl. His brightly colored ersatz Luthers were the size of garden gnomes, and
you could buy your own for 250 Euros.
Stripped of pedestal and baldachin and cut down to size, Luther’s charisma
was reduced to kitsch. Professor Hoerl’s installation hit a nerve, as letters from
outraged Lutherans testified. And it is no accident that the statue Hoerl chose
to tease people with was not a contemporary image but the nineteenth-century
monumental Luther that dominates the market square: Hoerl’s artwork
addressed Luther’s place in history. Taking the figure of an individual whose
body is iconic, it poked fun at German history and German identity.
Hoerl’s dwarf Luthers remind us that Protestantism thrived on making
Luther large. From the very beginning, Luther’s personality was central to the
new faith. Luther kitsch is not an invention of the twenty-first century—from
the Diet of Worms onward, Luther medals, and later, Luther tiles, papier-mache
Luthers, and probably even souvenir swans from the house in Eisleben where
he was born, were available on sale.1 Luther’s personality was transmitted with
the message, in a manner unparalleled by any other Reformation figure, so
that the truth of his theology became bound up with his character. Though
the first “proper” biography was not published until 1557 by Ludwig Rabus,
there was a steady stream of writings about Luther’s life, both by himself and
others.2 Paying unconscious tribute to the power of his person, many of his
antagonists resorted to genres where character was key, like dialogues and
plays.3
219
220 Lyndal Roper
This focus on Luther’s personality has, from the outset, led to an engage-
ment with Luther’s psychology and has provided material for some of the
classics of psychoanalytic writing. In this chapter I discuss how Luther’s
personality has been understood. I shall begin with the most famous psy-
chobiography of Luther, that of Erik Erikson, and then turn to the writ-
ings of Erich Fromm, Norman O. Brown, Preserved Smith, and Paul Reiter,
all of whom attempted psychoanalytically influenced interpretations of the
reformer. These studies raise the more general issue of how psychoanalysis
has influenced historians in the twentieth century, and its uses and limits.
Probably no other historical character has inspired such a collection of biog-
raphies, and they illustrate the very varied ways in which historians have
drawn on psychological theories, from the Freudian caricature of Smith to the
nuanced examination of excremental themes by Brown. Probably no other
figure, too, has so united historians in rejecting psychoanalytic approaches
altogether. But, as I shall go on to show, psychological approaches to Luther
were present from the beginning, in the ways people engaged with the new
faith and with Luther as a character. Sixteenth-century people themselves
were convinced that his life was connected to the truth or falsity of his
theology—as Melanchthon put it, “[A]s even the Ancients said, His character
was, almost, so to speak, the strongest proof.”4 This was why the battles over
Luther’s legacy after his death were so passionate, and why such a rich mate-
rial culture of Protestantism developed around the figure of Luther the man.
Thinking about Luther’s psychology therefore enables us to put modern
and early modern approaches to Luther in dialogue with one another, and
to explore the intellectual issues raised by the twentieth-century project of
“psychoanalyzing” Dr. Luther.
* * *
Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther was a bestseller, and it exemplifies the vogue for
psychobiography in the 1950s. In studies of this kind, linking insights drawn
from behaviorism and psychoanalysis, Freudian ideas relating to instincts—
the sexual instincts in particular—were applied to historical characters to
create new analyses of motivation. Erikson’s book was written in English,
composed in Mexico, and published in the United States; and it was in a pro-
found sense American, adopting an outsider’s approach to the Germany he
had left many years before. The explicit explanatory framework of the book
is present-centered and derived from Erikson’s experience in working with
disturbed American adolescents undergoing identity crises.5 Luther as he
emerges in Erikson’s text is a universal figure, a timeless American hero; and
the book retains traces of the McCarthyite years in its portrayal of Luther as a
man who stood up to authority.6 But buried in the book and its subject matter
is also an engagement with Erikson’s German past, with exile, and with World
War II. Of Danish Jewish birth, he grew up near Frankfurt and traveled widely
in Germany before going to Vienna and Freud’s Psychoanalytic Institute; and
he invokes Albert Schweitzer in his introduction as the representative of the
The Seven-Headed Monster 221
kind of Protestantism he valued, after referring obliquely to “the bleached

bones of men of my kind in Europe.”7
Erikson’s thesis is that Luther’s revolt against the church sprang from a
deep conflict with a tyrannical father who treated him harshly during toilet
training, so that he remained stuck in the anal stage, obsessed with punish-
ment and with the authority of paternal figures. The Reformation arose out
of Luther’s individual development as he underwent a series of identity crises,
resolving these to become a great man (the passages on great men who “fight
through to the creativity of their manhood” with their unabashed mascu-
linism and emphasis on struggle sound dated now).8 Throughout the work
there is a tone of cutting Luther down to size, of taking him off his pedestal—
indeed, Erikson begins with Luther literally writhing on the ground, shouting
“Non sum! Non sum!” as the passage from the exorcism of demons is read from
the Bible. This is the famous “fit in the choir” incident, which derives from
Cochlaeus’s propagandist antibiography and from two other anti-Lutheran
sources, and is not confirmed by Luther or any of his supporters.9 As we shall
see, it is mentioned at the start of Cochlaeus’s work, where he uses it to link
Luther with the Devil and possession. And whereas Cochlaeus says that the
fit happened “several times,” Erikson stylizes it into a single event, an iden-
tity crisis. Erikson is twisting his sources here, prefiguring the even greater
creativity he will show when he invents Luther’s toilet training problem. The
interesting question is why he did so.
The psychobiography of the 1950s was a product of the aftermath of World
War II. It was characterized by the conviction that any individual’s behav-
ior could be made comprehensible through analysis of their childhood, and
through excavation of the unconscious libidinal forces that drove their actions.
To the Freudian tradition, Erikson added behavioral psychology and the idea
of developmental “stages,” which individuals traverse on their way to adult-
hood. With a tendency toward reductiveness, psychobiography analyzed both
complex unconscious motivations and conscious rational intentions as the
outcome of one or two basic drives and focused attention not just on deeply
buried experiences of early infancy but on adolescence, where the conflicts
were conscious rather than unconscious.
The psychobiographical method could often produce a kind of antibiogra-
phy, which had much to do with a revolt against the hero-worship of the “great
man” school of history. It also reflected a preoccupation with the nature of
leadership—and like many inversions, it often remained stuck in the intellec-
tual framework against which it ostensibly rebelled. Erikson’s book works like
a detective story, the denouement reserved for the penultimate chapter, with
the revelation of the toilet training crisis.10 For Erikson, all is revealed once we
know that the unfortunately named “Reformation breakthrough” happened
in the privy—though in fact it happened in the “cloaca” or privy tower where
Luther’s study was situated.11 Indeed, one could argue that Erikson’s biogra-
phy is itself slinging shit at Luther’s reputation, tarring him with anality. In
fact, Erikson is not wrong to highlight the importance of anality in Luther;
the problem arises when he pathologizes it.12 His best insights come as he
222 Lyndal Roper
explores not the invented childhood but Luther’s actual rhetoric, pointing
in a wonderful phrase to his “plain porcography”—Luther writes a good deal
about sows and pigs, and delights in equating his opponents with animals.13
The other major interpretative key for Erikson is Luther’s conflict with
his father, which he links to his embattled relationship with authority of all
kinds. He points out that Luther’s treatise against monasticism is prefaced
with a letter to his father, in which he finally resolves the crisis that led him
to disobey his father’s plans for him by entering the monastery. But Erikson’s
psychological interpretation distorts the function of this letter, which was
written in Latin. Luther’s father could not have read it. Never a genuine com-
munication, it was destined for print, the letter merely a literary form, a genre
Luther frequently employed.14 Here again, Erikson reduces a complex theme
to an individual relationship, which is treated as pathological, rather than
exploring Luther’s psychic life in broader terms.
There were certainly good reasons why Americans after World War II
should have wanted to engage with fatherhood, and why American soci-
ety should have seen relations with fathers as key to identity—this was how
Erikson’s book could speak to a whole American generation. Erikson was
himself almost destined to be the exponent of this theme. He never knew the
surname of his Danish father Erik, and his conception was the result of his
Danish mother’s extramarital affair. He had three patronyms: first, that of his
mother’s first husband, followed by that of her second, Homburger, the name
that survives in the “H” of Erik H. Erikson, and which retains the fragment
of his German identity. He invented his final name in adulthood. “Erikson”
thus allows him to create a whole line of Eriksons, of which he was the first
(Kai Erikson the sociologist is his son).15 There is of course an interesting par-
allel to Luther here, who also changed his name, probably around the time
of the posting of the 95 Theses, as Volker Leppin has persuasively argued. He
gave up the coarse and suggestive “Luder” or “hussy” for “Eleutherius,” the
freed one, which he shortened to Luther. Again, this allowed him to be the
first of a new line.16
Fatherhood in Luther, however, is a far wider psychic theme than his rela-
tionship to his actual father, just as Erikson’s engagement with fatherhood,
though sparked by his personal history, could appeal to a whole generation
because of his ability to make the very deep loss of “fatherhood,” caused by
his exile from Germany, resonate widely. This, rather than any glib congru-
ence with ideas about parenthood in 1950s America, probably accounts for the
book’s success. In his psychobiography of Luther, however, the imagined rela-
tionship to the individual father becomes the explanatory key, so that large
themes are reduced to pathologies (and Luther’s mother, Hannah, is virtually
obliterated from the story).17 This reaches its nadir when Erikson trumpets
that Luther “was at last able to forgive God for being a Father, and grant him
justification”; and that his attitude to the Pope and the Devil is a transfer-
ence from his attitude to his father.18 God’s grace is certainly a key theological
theme for Luther, but it doesn’t help us understand its psychic power for an
entire generation to reduce it to Luther’s relationship to his father.
However, Erikson excels at creating a powerful sense of Luther’s physicality.

He notes how the experience of preaching was reflected in his very stance,
his backward-leaning torso and his four-square evocation of authority.19 Here
he picks up on something that is conveyed from the very beginning in the
flood of woodcuts of Luther that issued from the Cranach workshop and the
Wittenberg presses. And though one might point out that Luther had no
monopoly on animal rhetoric, he certainly used it better than anyone else,
with Emser nicknamed “the goat,” the Pope derided as a sow, and his erst-
while friend Crotus Rubianus christened “the toad” (Crotus/Kröte). Erikson
relates this to primitive, magical thinking, and views the sow as an “identity
element” of Luther’s. And it certainly has powerful psychic force in Luther.
But what Erikson interestingly fails to see, given his Jewish heritage, is its pro-
found link with anti-Semitism. To view the sow as part of Luther’s individual
identity misses a far wider cultural connection; and it also overlooks the pow-
erful current of hatred at work here. Though Luther can praise the pig who
lolls in muck, he more often uses pigs as terms of insult, especially against
Jews. Indeed, Luther preached in a church whose exterior still boasts, high up
on the wall, the worst medieval Judensau depiction I have ever seen. Erikson,
eager to assimilate as an American, yet anxious for reconciliation with
Germany, consistently tries to avoid discussing the legacy of Nazi Germany
and his own Jewish heritage. Shortly before writing the book he had—to his
great pride—spoken in German at the University of Frankfurt in the presence
of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, at a ceremony marking
the centenary of Freud’s birth; and it was no accident that in Luther he chose
such a towering figure of German history. Throughout Young Man Luther, he
evades confronting the scale of Luther’s anti-Semitism, never connecting his
animal rhetoric or his anal language to derogatory images of Jews.20
Where Erikson looks for a toilet crisis, a much more brilliant dissection
of anality in Luther was provided by Norman O. Brown, writing in 1959. As
Brown puts it, “[T]he Devil is . . . a displaced materialization of Luther’s own
anality, which is to be conquered by being replaced where it came from.”21
Brown argues that the neo-Freudians since Freud had missed the centrality
of the physical to psychoanalysis—and this had not helped them to under-
stand Luther. They had also misunderstood Luther’s concept of the Devil
who, Brown argues (borrowing from Jung), is a descendant of the trickster
figure, “a projection of the psychological forces sustaining the economic
activity of primitive peoples” now merged into the figure of the Christian
Devil. The role played by the Devil in Luther’s thought is inextricably linked
to his eschatology: the Devil rules the world, so it is because the Last Days
are imminent that Luther can be certain of his victory over the Devil. In a
wonderful inversion of Tawney, Brown therefore argues that Luther’s assess-
ment of the world as subject to Satan means that he sees capitalism, too, as
diabolic and dirty, so that as he puts it, “[T]he psychological commitment of
Protestantism to capitalism is mediated by the notion of the Devil, not God.”
Consequently, he concludes, “Luther detects the Devil at work wherever he
sees disguised (sublimated) anality,” a perception that he takes to prefigure
224 Lyndal Roper
Freud’s view of civilization.22 This is all very well, but it fails to recognize
the positive attitude Luther also expresses toward excrement, which is part
of God’s creation—and a source of much of Luther’s humor. Indeed, as the
grandson of a peasant, Luther knew the worth of manure and was also well
aware of the medicinal power of fecal-based remedies: human excrement, he
opined, heals all wounds.23 Brown does not escape the very negative attitude
toward anality that characterized the writers of the 1950s and 1960s, and fails
to perceive how it is joined for Luther to creativity, healing, and play.24
* * *
One of the father figures against whom Erikson may have been rebelling is
Erich Fromm, whose classic Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, offered a
psychological diagnosis of both Luther and Calvin. Erikson refers to it only
once, in a dismissive summary, which plays down its psychoanalytic dimen-
sion, presenting it as crudely derivative from Tawney and Weber.25 Fromm’s
account of Luther, though a sketch rather than a biography, is in some ways
more interesting than Erikson’s. Writing in 1940–41, at a time when the
Wehrmacht was in the ascendant in Europe, Fromm’s biography presents
Luther through the optic of Nazism. Where Erikson deliberately places him-
self in a contemporary American context, Fromm’s essay is explicitly driven
by his desire to understand the nature of Hitler’s leadership and the well-
springs of his support.
Fromm never uses psychoanalysis in isolation from history. His intellectual
orientation had much in common with that of the Frankfurt School, which
sought to link psychoanalysis, sociology, and history. The material on which
he drew was the historiographical writing of the early twentieth century, pro-
foundly influenced by Marx and Weber, and so he sees the development of
capitalism as central to Lutheranism’s appeal. He relates Luther to the devel-
opment of the mining industry, though he could not know what we now
know, that Luther’s father was a middling capitalist entrepreneur, who would
eventually run into serious financial trouble, caught between the wheels of
the great financing houses of Nuremberg and the costs of running the mines
as the deposits became harder to reach.26 Refusing to linger on theological
approaches to the reformer, Fromm asserts straight out that “[c]ertain doctrines
of Luther and Calvin are so similar to those of the medieval church that it is
sometimes difficult to see any essential difference between them”27—and he
stresses the similarities between Luther and Calvin throughout. Nor is he espe-
cially interested in Luther’s individual psychology—he makes short work of his
“authoritarian character” and his “personality . . . torn by a constant ambiva-
lence towards authority.” What interests him is instead “the psychological situ-
ation of the social classes to which their ideas appealed.”28
Fromm’s real interest is the psychological underpinnings of fascism—in
particular, what leads certain groups to give up freedom and become depend-
ent on a leader. Psychoanalysis is much better suited to understanding indi-
vidual psychology than it is to explaining group behavior, so that Fromm’s
project forced him to develop a new theoretical model. Drawing on the theory
of anxiety, Fromm links this to Freud’s understanding of sadism and maso-
chism, relating them in turn to ideas that would be taken further by Klein
about individuation and separation. This is an interesting choice: Fromm
does not draw straight from Freud on the crowd, which might seem to offer
a ready-made explanatory framework for understanding the Germans’ sup-
port for Hitler. Instead he develops the idea that following a leader involves a
masochistic surrender of the ego. But rather than pursuing the argument to
explain the erotic component in the relation of the individual to the leader,
he links it to the desire for certainty.29 Perhaps the most brilliant passage
comes as Fromm develops the idea of the “magical helper,” a person whose
approval can become a magical authorization of truth, and he describes how
this can happen in a marriage, where the confidence of one partner can give
the other “magical assurance.” Luther’s faith, he claims, has this kind of “com-
pensatory quality,” where God as a “magical helper” provides authorization
for his views. And he uses the same idea to explain why Luther’s personality
became so important to his followers’ theology: it provided authorization.30
One might add that this could also help explain why Luther’s body and per-
sonality became part of the movement’s self-image. Because people fail fully
to overcome separation from the mother, and have weak ego development,
they can be susceptible to leaders like Hitler—as, earlier, one might point out,
to Luther, whose imposing fleshliness and confident stance was evidently
reassuring.
In aligning this self-abnegation with masochism, Fromm is also systemati-
cally stripping out the erotic dimension of Freud’s theory, just as he does in
his later versions of psychoanalytic theory. Fromm’s account of Nazism as
the masochistic love affair of the lower middle class with the Führer displays
an element of class contempt, as well as being an oversimplification. But the
concepts of masochism and projection, if the sexual element were not taken
out, and were applied to the relations between people rather than to a whole
social group, could be highly illuminating. It could help us understand the
powerful emotional charge of many of Luther’s friendships (as indeed of the
relations among Hitler’s inner circle). There is a dimension that might cer-
tainly be termed erotic in his passionate friendships with his former superior
in the Augustinian order Johann von Staupitz, with the court chaplain, secre-
tary, and librarian to the Elector Frederick the Wise Georg Spalatin, and with
his co-worker Philip Melanchthon, which, as we will see, deserves further
exploration.
The second strand of psychoanalytic thought on which Fromm draws is
the notion of repressed hostility, leading to hate and envy—of which he sees
a good deal at work in Luther.31 (It’s worth noting, though, that he thinks
Calvin is even worse—Fromm sees almost no redeeming features in Calvin.)
It might be countered that there’s not very much in the way of repressed hos-
tility in Luther—it all seems to be pretty much on the surface. But Fromm is
surely right in pointing to the importance of hatred in Luther—he shrewdly
remarks that “these two men, personally, belonged to the ranks of the greatest
226 Lyndal Roper
haters among the leading figures of history”32 —and in mentioning envy, he

has put his finger on a key emotional dynamic.
Indeed, one could go much further in exploring envy in Luther, a word
that regularly crops up in his early correspondence. He attributes envy to his
opponents, and often in unlikely circumstances. So he accuses his Catholic
antagonist in the Leipzig Debate, Eck, of acting out of envy toward him, and
complains in the next breath about the honors the Leipzigers heaped upon
Eck, giving him a cloak of fine cloth and holding banquets in his honor—
when Luther was not even accorded a civic reception.33 Rather less clear in
Fromm’s work, however, is how envy and hatred determine Luther’s action
and what role they play in his character, beyond the basic way in which envy
figures in most of us at least some of the time. Because he moves too rap-
idly to generalize the psychological profile he has uncovered to a whole soci-
ety, hatred and envy become his way of explaining why lower middle-class
Germans were attracted to Nazism—and this is an oddly moralistic rather
than psychological form of explanation.34
The cracks in Fromm’s explanatory edifice are particularly apparent when
it comes to relating social history to psychology. Echoing Toennies, Fromm
argues that the growth of capitalism led to a destabilization of the indi-
vidual’s sense of belonging, together with a greater sense of freedom. This
rests on a crude idealization of the medieval commune and of the extent to
which individuals did feel part of a Gemeinschaft—though it is also worth
noting how pervasive this assumption has been in Reformation historiog-
raphy since. Bernd Moeller’s classic Imperial Cities and the Reformation of
1972,35 which has dominated the agenda of a generation, retained more than
a shadow of Fromm’s idealization of the medieval commune, as he explained
the Reformation as a reaction to the loss of collective, communal identity in
towns—an explanation that will not work for Luther’s Saxony, whose politi-
cal ethos had nothing in common with the proud guild traditions and inde-
pendent governments of south German imperial cities. Though Fromm is
careful not to assume that Luther’s psychology typified that of everyone in
the sixteenth century, he still resorts to crude assumptions about the psy-
chology of social groups, because generalizing character structures remained
the only way to extrapolate psychoanalysis beyond the individual. Exactly
the same explanatory move is evident in Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process
of 1939, whose work on aggression and control of the instincts was equally
pervaded by the encounter with Nazism, and whose social psychology also
assumes a single psychological attitude for a whole society in a particular
epoch—usually one whose traits are tellingly male.
All these psychoanalytic analyses of Luther were formed in one way or
another through the project of thinking about Nazism and its roots in German
history; and all offered versions of Freud that sought to marry him with soci-
ology.36 It is interesting therefore to turn to the oldest and oddest of the mod-
ern psychobiographies of Luther: a short essay by Preserved Smith, published
in 1913 on the eve of World War I, which has no teleological agenda about
German history and concentrates on the individual alone.37 Smith had also
written a conventional biography of Luther, and the essay was an attempt to

rethink the life story in the light of Freud’s ideas.38 It is in many ways a percep-
tive study, though it draws on Freud’s early works only (the later ideas about
the death instinct and the full elaboration of the structure of the ego were still
to come). Smith relates Luther’s problems to his struggles against masturba-
tion, and argues that his torrent of writings and teachings were a sublimation
of his sexual instinct. He also draws attention to the theme of incest in Luther
and points to evidence of oedipal elements in his work, including Luther’s
fascination with the story of a mother-son incest case in Erfurt, which he men-
tioned many times in his Table Talk (the records of Luther’s dinner conversa-
tion, transcribed by his students and published after his death).39
It would be easy to dismiss Smith’s work as the worst kind of crude
Freudianism, where the oedipal triangle explains all, especially since Luther’s
attitude to sex is remarkably positive given his Augustinian heritage. The
story about the incest case in Erfurt is not particularly prurient: its point is
that since neither son nor daughter knew their parentage, their union was no
sin.40 There is no evidence that Luther regarded concupiscience as his greatest
spiritual problem: his main failing, he believed, was his insufficient love and
trust in God. Even so, Smith had an intuitive sense of the psychic dimensions
and costs of an attack on established religion—his own father, a New England
minister, had been expelled for heresy—and he may also help us to under-
stand the extraordinary sexual energy of the early Reformation, as a whole
generation of celibate men and women got married. Indeed, Luther’s corre-
spondence from this period is full of wedding invitations and of requests to
the Elector via Spalatin, Luther’s friend and the Elector’s secretary, for gifts
of game (Wildbrett) to honor the various Wittenberg wedding feasts. And his
later years were dominated by the endless “marriage problems,” as Luther
had to adjudicate on countless matrimonial cases, the most prominent of
which was the infamous bigamy of Philip of Hesse, when one of the leading
Lutheran princes publicly took a second wife, seemingly with Luther’s sup-
port.41 Indeed, as Beth Plummer’s work has shown, the sexual difficulties of
the early Reformation clergy were a major problem for the reformers, and
a gift for their opponents.42 The “incest in Erfurt” case was just one of the
many stories about sex, marriage, and the law that Luther told where his con-
clusions were as emphatic as they were unpredictable and shocking. Nearly
always Luther concludes that sexual expression has to be allowed—it is his
sexual openness rather than repression that is his hallmark. What is striking
is how far Luther was prepared to go in overturning established ways of regu-
lating sex and marriage.43
* * *
All these authors developed psychological interpretations of Luther, but they

were not the first to do so. Luther’s contemporaries were also drawn into
examinations of his character. Some deliberately set their faces against doing
so: Spalatin, for one, wrote a chronicle of the Reformation years in which
228 Lyndal Roper
Luther appears incidentally and not until 1518, the year after the posting of
the 95 Theses.44 His chronicle eschews the personal, even though the friend-
ship with Luther was undoubtedly the key emotional relationship of his life.
He devoted most of his later life to archiving that correspondence and writing
the definitive histories of the Dukes of Saxony and of the Reformation in his
tiny, crabbed hand on pieces of paper barely bigger than A5. Melanchthon’s
funeral speech and biographical sketch do what they can to present Luther as
a humanist, but he is at pains to portray Luther in the round, frankly admit-
ting that “his nature was ardent and irascible.”45
But the most interesting psychological portrait of Luther was painted by his
lifelong antagonist, Johannes Cochlaeus. There is certainly something maso-
chistic in Cochlaeus’s obsession with Luther. He began as a passionate adher-
ent of Luther and enemy of Eck, urging Luther to stand firm in support of the
gospel. But he changed sides, and in a dramatic encounter with Luther at the
inn where the reformer was staying during his Imperial hearing at Worms
in 1521, Cochlaeus threw down the gauntlet: Luther should engage him in
free debate, and do so man to man, giving up his safe-conduct.46 The pro-
posal played on Luther’s pride as well as with his flirtation with martyrdom,
and the reformer at first agreed. But Luther’s supporters were furious with
Cochlaeus for placing Luther’s life in danger. Before Cochlaeus even reached
home, poems reviling him were circulating among Luther’s educated parti-
sans, and he was excluded forever from the progressive evangelical humanist
circles to which he had so wished to belong.47 For the rest of his life, Cochlaeus
devoted all his intellectual energies to refuting Luther. Derided for his efforts,
not even the Catholics supported him—several of his books, including his
account of the ill-fated visit at the inn, were put on the Index.48 Meanwhile,
Luther, whose attention he so craved, deigned only once to respond, and
then, nearly two years later, by way of a published letter to a friend who had
sent him a copy of one of Cochlaeus’s polemics.49 Cochlaeus immediately
replied in print—but Luther never answered, remarking some years later, “I
won’t answer any of Cochlaeus’s books ever again, this way he will get much
angrier, for if I were to answer him, he would only get proud.”50
For the rest of his life, Cochlaeus “answered” each new error of Luther as it
appeared,51 capping it all with a Historia of Luther, which he published in 1549.
This is in fact an autobiography too, for it summarizes every pamphlet penned
by “Dr Johannes Cochlaeus.”52 Since Luther would not respond, he resorted to
ventriloquizing him, and his best-known work, Seven-Headed Luther, is written
as the longed-for debate with Luther, with Cochlaeus pointing out the correct
view to his patron Duke George at the end of every section.53 But it is the cover
illustration that lands the most memorable hit, the brilliant image of Luther’s
seven heads intended to link the reformer with the Beast of the Apocalypse.
And yet the image, with the visual realization of Luther’s different incarna-
tions, also testifies to the power of his personality, making him seem a man
of many parts rather than an apocalyptic monster. His supporters seized their
chance, quipping, “Oh if Luther has seven heads now he will be invincible,
since up until now they haven’t managed to best his single head.”54
Cochlaeus constituted himself as Luther’s dark other.55 His career parallels

Luther’s with uncanny precision; Cochlaeus was posted at the court of the
Catholic Duke George of Saxony while Luther was linked with the Saxon
Elector, Frederick the Wise. He even dedicated some of his works to Luther’s
Duke John the future Elector of Saxony himself, as if trying to steal Luther’s
patron. If Luther had a Turmerlebnis, his life-changing experience in the
Cloaca tower when he suddenly understood the meaning of God’s justice,
Cochlaeus’s equivalent was the meeting with Luther at the inn during the
Diet of Worms in 1521, when he came face to face with the man himself and
tried to tempt him to a debate.56 Decades later, he published his account of
the Diet of Worms in a pamphlet, and included the story in his Commentary
as a part of his narrative, as if inserting himself into this historic event along-
side Luther (Melanchthon’s version of Cochlaeus’s role in the discussions dis-
misses him, referring to “Johannes Cochlaeus sometimes making noise in the
midst of this . . . ”).57
Cochlaeus’s Historia of Luther was also a psychological diagnosis, penned
by a man obsessed with his subject. As Cochlaeus presents him, Luther was
driven by pride and hatred. He is a choleric. However, Cochlaeus does not
present a portrait based on a humoral diagnosis, but rather a moral one in
terms of the theology of sin. A proud man, “Luther trusted in his own intel-
lect and learning,” and this led him to disobedience to authority: “his heart
was always filled with sharpness, pride, and rebellion.”58 Hatred and envy
led him to take more and more extreme positions, and Cochlaeus charts
the sequential nature of his heresy, one assault on authoritative truth lead-
ing inevitably to the next. Shrewdly he observes that the problem with the
Wittenberg prophets was not that they made what Luther saw as doctrinal
errors, but that they threatened to outshine Luther.59 Like Erikson, Cochlaeus
sees Luther’s fundamental problem as his lack of respect for authority.
That diagnosis is even sharper in the scurrilous play Cochlaeus wrote, A
Secret Dialogue of the Tragedy of Johann Huss, published in 1538 under a pseu-
donym. It dramatizes Luther’s conflict with Agricola, formerly the preacher
at Eisleben, who had moved back to Wittenberg. Cochlaeus presents the con-
flict as turning on the publication of a history of the Bohemian martyr and
“heretic” Huss; in fact, the issue was far more serious, turning on the place of
law in the gospel, and would eventually result in a permanent theological rift
between the two men, as Luther published his Against the Antinomians the fol-
lowing year and had Agricola drummed out of town. Cochlaeus’s Luther has
all the hallmarks of anger, pride, and envy. His followers Jonas and Spalatin
tremble with anxiety at the prospect of his ire and, once roused, Luther’s
“forehead is wrinkled and his eyes flash.” His acolytes address him in the
polite form while he replies with the informal “du,” and they invent fawning
titles for him such as “your grace,” “your reverence.” Luther thunders against
his opponents, cursing them as inspired by the devil—here, Cochlaeus man-
ages to capture Luther’s tone perfectly, the insistent allegation that the Devil
is behind it all, the sense of world-weariness, the repetitiveness. And he is
constantly worried about preserving “his” gospel, only too aware that he
230 Lyndal Roper
needs martyrs and a history to prove the lineage of his “sixteen year old”
church, and that, much as he would like to do so, Huss’s impure theology
cannot be pressed into service to provide it.60
But the highlight of the play comes as Cochlaeus has the wives of the
reformers come on stage, and Agricola’s wife tries to get the women to inter-
cede with Luther on her husband’s behalf. Cochlaeus provides acid vignettes
of the sexual politics of the Reformation. Mrs Melanchthon smarts with the
social humiliation of having always to give precedence to Mrs Provost and
Mrs Bishop; Mrs Provost arrives late because her husband has called her into
his study for a spot of hanky-panky—he likes nothing better than a bit of
“fantasy,” though, weak of body, performance is not his strong point. Mrs
Bishop of Altenburg, Spalatin’s wife and a terrible snob, complains that no
child will come of “kissing and cuddling,” and wants to borrow Luther for the
night—in line with the reformer’s advice (as Cochlaeus notes) that a woman
who cannot conceive with her husband should lie with another. These
barbs were well chosen and suggest Cochlaeus knew what he was talking
about: Spalatin did not have children for the first six years of his marriage;
and Agricola, whose stage wife complains he is a drunkard and a gambler
and “worse,” was indeed embroiled in drunken brawls in Eisleben.61 Both
Katharina von Bora (Luther’s wife) and Justus Jonas’s wife pleaded in reality
for Agricola with Luther. When Agricola’s wife asks her daughter how she
will know who Katharina von Bora is, she replies she will have no trouble rec-
ognizing her, because her picture is simply everywhere—a canny jibe at the
double-portraits that flooded from the Cranach workshop.62 And Cochlaeus’s
“Katharina” would host the women with the finest Rhine wine—except that
the barrel is nearly empty—and, disdaining the local beer—she offers the
best Hamburg, Einbeck, and “Braunschwickische Mumen” beer in its place—
again, a knowing reference to her famed provisioning.63 In the final scene of
the play, Katharina and Martin appear together, and she tries to get him to go
to bed with her, insisting that as Paul says, she is the owner of his body and
so he must be subject to her. Martin, impressed by her biblical knowledge,
fears nonetheless that she may have had recourse to another teacher. But he
grumpily accedes to her wishes and lets himself be twisted around her finger
to forgive Agricola. Cochlaeus presents Luther as a superstud surrounded by
impotent cuckolds, in a household where Katharina actually rules the roost,
and whose concupiscience gets the better of his anger.64 Luther, as Cochlaeus
sees him, is given to the pleasures of the flesh. This was a charge made in other
polemics too, including the Bohemian Johann Hasenberg’s brief drama against
Luther, which satirizes Luther’s married life, or Simon Lemnius’s Latin verse
dialogue Monachopornomachia of around 1540, based on Juvenal, which stages
Luther’s wedding and also caricatures the wives of the reformers.65 Lemnius,
formerly a favorite student of Melanchthon’s, turned against the Reformation,
and took none other than the hated Albrecht of Mainz, whose sale of indul-
gences sparked the Reformation, as his patron.
If Cochlaeus was alert to the sexual politics of the Reformation among
Luther’s group of followers, Luther was not slow to retaliate, nicknaming him
“Rotzloeffel” or “snot-nose.”66 Since the sixteenth century equated the nose

and the penis, this mocks him as a green youth and also questions his virility.
His name meant “Schnecke” or snail—and Cochlaeus did indeed trail after
Luther, trying to keep up with his rapidly changing theology, searching for the
holes in Luther’s arguments and filing away the inconsistencies. “Schnecke”
was also the model for the pious woman, and Luther was not above imputing
womanishness to his opponent. The title page of Luther’s single published
attack on Cochlaeus, “Adversus armatum virum Cokleum” (Against the armed
man Cochlaeus) bears the Latin motto “a skirt suits a woman well” (Colum
mulierem decet).67 This is a pun on Cochlaeus’s name, a jibe at his “arms”—
monks were not permitted weapons—and a taunt at monkish cassocks rolled
into one, though, as Ulinka Rublack has shown, the garb on which Luther
eventually settled, as he designed his own “preacher’s look,” had a loose outer
garment, albeit with manly hose underneath.68 Luther also dates the work
to Carnival, a time of fun and of inversion of all kinds—yet further trivial-
izing Cochlaeus’s work. Feminizing Cochlaeus also implied that he lacked
courage—the very accusation Cochlaeus made against Luther. In the battle
between Luther and Cochlaeus, there is clearly a psychological struggle for
the breeches going on. For though Luther held aloof, he read Cochlaeus’s
attacks, and regularly sounded off about him in the Table Talk; while Luther’s
invective against Duke George of Saxony, Cochlaeus’s employer, was proxy
for Cochlaeus (who actually composed many of the duke’s public statements
against the Reformation).69
What do we gain if we relate the Reformation to the history of emotion,
and explore its seamier psychic drives? Cochlaeus’s scurrilous play suggests
that sexual identities were on the line in the early Reformation—and this is
not surprising when the abolition of monasticism removed the possibility
of being male and celibate, and of not having to prove masculinity through
sexual performance. In Cochlaeus’s text, the Reformation proceeds in a series
of contests, and debate (rather than publishing) is the key forum in which to
demonstrate truth. Consequently Cochlaeus describes Eck as “intrepid and
indefatigable,” Tetzel as “fierce in his intellect and strong in his body,” laying
considerable emphasis on their robust and aggressive deportment—Luther by
contrast is a miserable figure, a man who uses the excuse of weakness of body
to avoid debate. And Cochlaeus was not alone—Simon Lemnius, another
former adherent turned antagonist, also poked fun at Luther’s illnesses and
frailty. As Cochlaeus presents it, truth is arrived at through man to man com-
bat—and Luther replied in the same coin that Cochlaeus was womanly.
Luther’s psychology was also, as Cochlaeus saw it, fundamentally tied
to his theology through the question of theological certainty; that is, how
Luther could know that his reading of scripture and his assurance of salva-
tion were true. This is why the scene at the inn is so crucial for Cochlaeus, for
when Cochlaeus asks how Luther can be so sure of his interpretation of scrip-
ture, Luther replies that he knows (one might be reminded here of Fromm’s
idea of the magical helper who gives certainty to others). For Cochlaeus, this
is the key point, and he returns to it again and again, importuning Luther
232 Lyndal Roper
repeatedly with his questions at Worms in 1521 when Luther appeared to

defend his views in front of the entire assembled estates of the Holy Roman
Empire—and when he must surely have had other things on his mind. As
Cochlaeus saw it, an individual’s certainty cannot make something true,
for an internal state can be produced by a demon (hence his reiteration of
Luther’s encounters with the Devil). Only the authority of the church can
guarantee the rightness of any position, never subjective experience.70
The ultimate irony of Cochlaeus’s lifelong obsession with refuting Luther
is that at core his dispute was not so much theological as psychological, for it
turned on whether what Luther saw as faith, and what Cochlaeus regarded as
individual, subjective, experience, can ever be authoritative. Every pamphlet
he wrote, the snail following in Luther’s intellectual trail, publicized Luther’s
views; indeed, it is to Cochlaeus’s account of Luther in the inn at Worms
that we owe the vision of Luther with the lyre, the man of the people sing-
ing and entertaining the drinkers.71 His delineation of Luther’s psychological
flaws merely served to underscore Luther’s centrality to the movement, and
contributed to what Fromm would term his standing as “magical helper” to
those who needed assurance. As he castigated Luther’s robust fleshliness and
positive attitude to sexuality, he faithfully reflected an aspect of Luther that
was central to his appeal—that sexual energy that Preserved Smith also real-
ized was part of the ethos of the Wittenberg Reformation in its early years,
and which Cochlaeus as Vogelsang dramatized in his scurrilous play. And
when he accused Luther of being motivated by hatred and envy, he was again
astute, for Luther’s correspondence is indeed peppered with references to
envy—including in Cochlaeus.
The sixteenth century was particularly attuned to envy and to what it caused,
namely, witchcraft. The witch was believed to suffer from envy, and this was
what caused her attacks. In the 1520s, the equation of the figure of Envy with
a witch-like old harpy, drawn from Ovid’s story of Aglauros in her cave, was
just starting to become a commonplace, and her image would become a fixed
visual formula, shaping in its turn the image of the witch. Hans Sachs penned
a long poem about envy, and Luther referred to what he ironically personi-
fied as “St Neithard.”72 Envy is an emotion that is painful to acknowledge and
which is therefore often projected onto others—as both Luther and Cochlaeus
did to each other. If Cochlaeus accused Luther of being driven by “the livid
effect of envy,” the prompt for one of Luther’s table talk disquisitions on Envy,
the enemy of Christ and his word, was mention of Cochlaeus.73
Envy is closely related to jealousy, which is in turn connected to love, for
it springs from wanting to have what another person has. It is impossible to
miss the undercurrent of passionate identification with Luther in Cochlaeus.
Like Luther, Cochlaeus too flirted with martyrdom, and this is why he can
recognize it in Luther. In Worms in 1521, Cochlaeus turns the story around
so that he, Cochlaeus, is the one who is willing to debate with Luther and
endure martyrdom: writing about himself in the third person, he says that
Cochlaeus “had come [to Worms] for no other cause than that he might
expose and submit his body and his life to the utmost danger, if there were
need, for the faith and honor of the Church. For he was burning with a great
zeal . . . ”74 In fact it was of course Luther who was in genuine peril. Cochlaeus
sees, though, how Luther is following the double path of both courting mar-
tyrdom as his outbursts become more extreme (Luther writes constantly of
martyrdom in his correspondence with Spalatin at this time)—while at the
same time, bullying Spalatin and the Elector to ensure it would not happen.
So it is not surprising that the martyrology of the early Reformation is one of
Cochlaeus’s targets—he was outraged, too, by the way evangelicals celebrated
“Brother Henry,” Henry van Zutphen as a martyr when this renegade priest
was killed by hostile peasants, and he intuits why having martyrs was vital
for the evangelical sense of self.75
Indeed, Cochlaeus here hits on something very important, for one of the
problems confronting Luther’s biography was that he was not a martyr. Far
from it, his vital, bulky physicality was about as far from martyrdom as any-
one could be. This was a problem for the new church, which needed to prove
that it was the true apostolic church and so needed signs such as martyrs
to establish itself. The first Lutheran biography of the reformer is thus the
centerpiece of a seven-volume martyrology by Ludwig Rabus, who includes
among Luther’s predecessors martyrs like Huss and Savanarola (small won-
der Cochlaeus was determined to write a “true” history of Huss).76 This is
why Luther’s other Lutheran biographers Cyriakus Spangenberg and Johann
Mathesius detail Luther’s illnesses and digestive difficulties—how, for instance
“Upon this day as age began to press upon him our Doctor was attacked with
a serious illness and was so heavily plagued by the stone and was constipated
for eleven days so that he himself and many other good people began to
despair of him”77—this was the nearest to martyrdom Luther had to offer.
* * *
As writings like those of Cochlaeus show, there was a tradition of psycho-

logical thinking well before Freud and psychoanalysis. That tradition built
upon ideas about sin, the humoral constitution, and absorbed the psycho-
logical insights taken from the classics, in particular, from Ovid. The Greek
and Roman mythological tradition offered a stock of ways of understanding
human motivation, and these were becoming a familiar visual and verbal lan-
guage in sixteenth-century Europe, because they featured as school texts and
were being translated into European vernaculars. Freud’s theories also drew
heavily on Greek and Roman myth, not only in their technical language (the
Oedipus complex), but also in their subject matter. Much of what Erikson,
Fromm, and other exponents of psychoanalysis said about Luther had already
figured in contemporary accounts: Fromm’s emphasis on hatred and envy is
found in Cochlaeus, who is equally alive to the hostility to authority that
Erikson relates to fatherhood; Smith’s emphasis on sexual drive is also a major
theme of Cochlaeus’s work, especially in his play. Indeed, Fromm’s stress on
envy and hatred among Hitler’s lower middle-class supporters comes occa-
sionally close to using the typology of the sins to explain fascism.
234 Lyndal Roper
The twentieth-century psychobiographers of Luther (Smith aside) inter-

preted Luther through the optic of Nazism—even Erikson squeezes a char-
acter sketch of Hitler into his biography. In 1941, Fromm needed more than
any of them to explain the psychic constellations that drove a whole society
to idolize Hitler. Yet in his book, Luther stands alone; Fromm is not interested
in taking psychoanalysis beyond the individual by exploring the dynam-
ics of interaction among the Wittenbergers—or among Hitler’s intimates
either. Instead, in his work, society becomes an individual psychology writ
large, and this makes his explanation ultimately unsatisfactory, because its
social analysis cannot do justice to the complexities of German society. The
dynamic relations between people was, on the other hand, what obsessed
Cochlaeus, and he was such a shrewd observer of the interplay of sexual anxi-
eties and psychic investments among the Lutherans because he knew it from
the inside. Yet even though he was one of the few polemicists who knew how
to write popular polemic, he could not explain why it was that evangelicalism
had become a popular movement, beyond pointing to how “The Lutherans
said things that were pleasing to the people, against laziness and avarice and
luxury,” or blaming it on the printers, who, he alleged, were all ex-monks,
and would not print Catholic works, or else printed them badly on purpose.78
Though he devoted his entire life to combating the Lutheran heresy, he had
no analysis of its appeal beyond individual sin.
The intellectual problem with which the psychobiographers of the 1940s
and 1950s grappled was how to take psychoanalysis beyond the individual,
into psychohistorical diagnoses of entire societies. This was the project of the
Frankfurt school, to synthesize sociology, psychoanalysis, and history into
a general account of Western modernity, with the Reformation as the key
moment that marked the birth of “modern man.” This is why Fromm began
his quest for the psychological origins of fascism with Luther, after sketching
his medieval backdrop. The problem with this project is twofold: the search
for the “dawn of the modern” results in a crude simplification of the medi-
eval world, jettisoning complexity in the interests of identifying the “new.”
And at the same time, the history that is pressed into service is narrowly
economistic, using the chains and pulleys of economic change to explain
the “modern” subjectivity of an individual like Luther, and producing a card-
board cut-out portrait of the mentalities of the “middle class.” By contrast,
Cochlaeus’s portrait of Luther, organized by a medieval understanding of the
psychology of sin, has a surer grasp of the relations between people and of the
muddier psychic impulses at work in the Reformation.
The challenge of using psychoanalysis therefore remains, since it revolves
around the thorny issue of how subjectivity can effectively be incorporated
into social history. The linguistic turn has better equipped us to analyze
the verbal slips or favored words in the writings of those we study; we have
learnt from psychoanalysts how to think about the unconscious investments
at work in all human relationships; and we have a clearer sense of the various
and complex ways that people respond to historical developments. This very
diversity of human response, of course, makes it difficult to venture general
historical interpretations. Yet psychological conflicts, emotions, and uncon-

scious fantasies do not occur in some mental ghetto, cut off from social
reality, but interface constantly with this reality, and for that reason alone if
no other, we have to try to bring traditional historical concerns with causa-
tion together with our pursuit of the inner lives of individuals in the past.
Fromm’s answers to the questions he asked do not satisfy, but the challenge
he posed remains compelling: to write a history that does justice both to the
complex economic and social changes that led to the world we know, and
the subjectivities of such richly complicated and fascinating individuals as
the reformer Martin Luther.
Notes
I would like to thank Ruth Harris, Alison Light, Michael Roper, Daniel Pick, Barbara Taylor,
the Oxford Psychoanalysis and History Seminar, and Nick Stargardt for help in writing
this piece.
1. Luther was associated with the swan, as Hus with the goose; and there are many wood-
cuts that show Luther with a swan. See Lutherhalle Wittenberg, ed., [Volkmar Joestel
and Jutta Strehle], Luther mit dem Schwan. Tod und Verklärung eines großen Mannes. Katalog
zur Ausstellung in der Lutherhalle Wittenberg anläßlich des 450.Todestages von Martin Luther
(Schelzky and Jeep: Berlin, 1996); for Luther relics, see Harald Meller, ed., Fundsache
Luther. Archäologen auf den Spuren des Reformators (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2008), catalogue for
the exhibition held in Halle, 316–327; Ulinka Rublack, “Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism
and the Materialization of the Word,” Past & Present Supplement (2010), 144–166; Lyndal
Roper, “Luther Relics,” forthcoming.
2. Ludwig Rabus, Historien: Der Heyligen Außewölten Gottes Zeügen/Bekennern vnd
Martyrern . . . Der vierdte Theyl (Strasbourg: Samuel Emmel, 1557). See also Irena
Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and
Foes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and Susan Boettcher, “Cyriakus Spangenberg als
Geschichtsschreiber,” in Stefan Rhein and Günther Wartenberg, eds., Reformatoren
im Mansfelder Land: Erasmus Sarcerius und Cyriakus Spangenberg (Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 2006), 155–170; see also her forthcoming The Memory of Martin Luther,
1546–1580.
3. See, e.g., Johannes Hasenberg, Lvdvs Lvdentem Lvderum Lvdens (Leipzig: Michael Blum,
1530), a drama whose title page also has a fourfold woodcut of the play’s characters, or,
in letter form, Joachim von der Heyde, Ein Sendtbrieff Kethen võ Bhore Luthers vormey-
nthem eheweybe sampt eynem geschenck freuntlicher meynung tzuuor=fertigt. (Leipzig:
Valentin Schumann, 1528).
4. Elizabeth Vandiver, Ralph Keen, and Thomas D. Frazel, eds. and trans., Luther’s Lives.
Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002), 18.
5. An important aspect of the book’s composition is that it was written without access to
a research library, which also freed Erikson from engaging with the full mass of Luther
research, and allowed his own ideas to emerge uncluttered. On how Erikson wrote the
book, see Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect. A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New
York: Scribner, 1999), 268–286.
6. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1958, 1962). He even invokes the Gettysburg address in the Introduction,
10. On Erikson’s ambiguous role during the McCarthy crisis, see Friedman, Identity’s
Architect, 243–252: he refused to take the oath and published a statement of his reasons;
but he probably nonetheless signed a university contract, which contained a modified
version of it.
236 Lyndal Roper
7. The full reference is to “a memory which had been utterly covered by the rubble of the
cities and by the bleached bones . . . ” (10): this is an interesting formulation because it
links the bombing of the German cities (which targeted German civilians), and the
Holocaust in a single phrase. “Bleached bones” is an inaccurate euphemism. It is as if
Erikson wants to see the bombing and the Holocaust as a single event, thus representing
Jews and German civilians as equally “victims,” while denying to himself the actual
form the Holocaust took. See Friedman, Identity’s Architect, for more details on Erikson’s
Jewish heritage and attitude toward the Holocaust.
8. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 9.
9. Ibid., 23: this is the beginning of chapter 2, the point when Luther is introduced to
us for the first time; and the incident is also discussed in pages 138–150. See also
Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 272—who wrongly states that Erikson claims Luther had
this fit during his first mass; in fact Erikson distinguishes this attack of anxiety from
the “fit in the choir.” The sources Erikson gives for the story are Cochlaeus’s biography
of 1549 via Scheel’s collection of source material to 1519: Otto Scheel, Dokumente zu
Luthers Entwicklung (bis 1519), 2nd edn (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1929),
201, 553; and Vom Katholizismus zur Reformation 2 vols (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul
Siebeck], 1916–17), vol. 2, 116, but this cites exactly the same material from Cochlaeus.
The story is given in Cochlaeus at the outset, Vandiver, Luther’s Lives [Cochlaeus], 55.
It is also to be found in Simon Fontanus’s equally hostile Historiae Ecclesiasticae Nostri
Temporis, Libri XVII In quibus pr[a]eterquam nuda ueritas; reru[m] gestaru[m] series fidelite
recensetur, etia[m] p[er]multa quae Iohannes Sleidanus in suis de Statu Religionis; Reipublicae
Com[m]entarijs nugatur, luculentissime reteguntur (Cologne: Jaspar von Gennep, 1558),
23, though there it concerns a single incident rather than a regular occurrence. It is
repeated in Johann Oldecop’s hostile chronicle, Chronik des Johan Oldecop, ed. Karl
Euling, Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins Stuttgart, CXC (Tübingen: Litterarischer
Verein Stuttgart, 1891), 18, which draws especially on Fontanus.
10. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 247–248.
11. I am grateful to Erik Midelfort for this joke; it is still unclear in exactly which part of the
building the discovery took place; Meller, Fundsache Luther, 148.
12. “In its excess, Luther’s obscenity expresses the needs of a manic-depressive nature
which has to maintain a state of unrelenting paranoid repudiation of an appointed
enemy on the outside in order to avoid victimizing and, as it were, eliminating itself”
(Erikson, Young Man Luther, 246).
13. Ibid., 197.
14. De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–) [hereafter cited
as WA], WA 8 (564), 573–669, 573–576, and the whole work was translated into German
by Justus Jonas. There are many versions of this story to be found in the Table Talk,
and in a “real” letter to Melanchthon of September 9, 1521, WA Br 2, 385, Luther uses
almost the same words as in the published “letter,” which appeared in February 1522,
but was probably written only a few months after the letter to Melanchthon (Spalatin,
to Luther’s dismay, had delayed its publication, and as Luther was in hiding in the
Wartburg at this point, he was dependent on Spalatin to get his work to the printer).
The story was not included in Melanchthon’s short life of Luther, nor is it in Rabus’s
life, closely based on Melanchthon, and it is absent from Myconius’s history as well
(Friedrich Myconius, Geschichte der Reformation, ed. Otto Clemen [Leipzig 1914, reprint
Gotha: Forschungsbibliothek, 1990]); but it went on to become a standard part of
Luther’s biography, transmitted partly through the publication of the Table Talk—so,
e.g., Luther’s biographer Mathesius reports that his father said “sehet zu/ das ewer
schrecken nicht ein Teuffelisch betrug gewesen/ Man soll dennoch den Eltern vmb
Gottes worts willen gehorsam sein” adding that Luther was heartily sorry about this
until he gave up his monastic vows—he draws the moral (4v) that one should always
obey one’s parents. Johannes Mathesius, Historien/ Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen
thewren Manns Gottes/ Doctoris Martini Luthers (Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg Erben und
Dietrich Gerlatz, 1566, 1573).
15. Friedman, Identity’s Architect, esp. 143–147: he became Erikson in 1938 when he applied
for American citizenship.
16. Volker Leppin, Martin Luther (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006),
117–126.
17. For an insightful and sensitive correction, see Ian Siggins, Martin Luther and His
Mother(Augsburg, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1981), based on his earlier essay “Luther’s
Mother Margarethe,” The Harvard Theological Review 71(1 and 2) (1978), 125–150.
18. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 222, 247.
19. Ibid., 196–197; and see 245–247.
20. Luther’s anti-Semitism is mentioned only in passing on page 236. On the Frankfurt
speech, see Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 243, 273.
21. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death. The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
(Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1959, 2nd edn with an Introduction by
Christopher Lasch, 1985); 209.
22. Ibid., 220, 221, 225.
23. John Wilkinson, The Medical History of the Reformers, Luther, Calvin and Knox (Edinburgh:
Handsel Press, 2001) 46, note 117: Luther says that God has put such great and valuable
medicaments in the “dirt,” so that pig and horse feces can be used and human feces
“heals all wounds.” WA Tischreden [hereafter cited as WA TR] 2, no. 2040, 301.19–23.
24. See my “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and His Biographers,” The American
Historical Review 115(2) (2010), 351–384.
25. Erikson, Young Man Luther, 239; Brown is also highly critical of Fromm.
26. See Michael Fessner, “Die Familie Luder und das Bergwerks- und Hüttenwesen in der
Grafschaft Mansfeld und im HerzogtumBraunschweig-Wolfenbüttel,” in Rosemarie
Knape, ed., Martin Luther und Eisleben (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2007),
11–31; and Andreas Stahl, “Baugeschichtliche Erkenntnisse zu Luthers Elternhaus in
Mansfeld und seiner Bewohner,” Knape, ed., Martin Luther und Eisleben, 353–390.
27. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London 1942, 2001) 3, 59.
28. Ibid., 56–57.
29. Interestingly, he even displaces here the Freudian idea of the pleasure that the maso-
chist feels in pain via identification with the one inflicting pain.
30. Fromm, Fear of Freedom, 149–153.
31. Ibid., 81–85.
32. Ibid., 82.
33. See Roper, “‘To His Most Learned and Dearest Friend’: Reading Luther’s Letters,” German
History 28(3) (2010), 283–295, 290.
34. See in particular, Fromm, Fear of Freedom, 178–206, where he applies his analysis to Nazi
Germany.
35. Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation. Three Essays, ed. and trans. H. C.
Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards (Augsburg MN: Fortress Press, 1972), originally
Reichsstadt und Reformation, (= Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 180, 1962);
and republished several times, most recently in 2011 with an introduction by Thomas
Kaufmann.
36. There is even something to be learnt from Paul Reiter’s two-volume psychological diag-
nosis of Luther published in 1937 and 1941 in Copenhagen, which eschews sociology
but which identifies Luther’s “illness” as manic depression with touches of schizophre-
nia—this work, its first volume published in a Jewish press, its second, in a press given
over to Aryan expropriators, is a very strange work indeed, though it leaves an echo in
Erikson’s assessment of Luther as experiencing mania and depression. It does remind us
however that Luther could be extremely moody and emotionally labile, and he undoubt-
edly went through phases of what we might term depression; there are also euphoric
moments in his correspondence, especially in the years leading up to Worms, when
he became a public figure and faced martyrdom. Paul Reiter, Martin Luthers Umwelt,
Charakter und Psychose sowie die Bedeutung dieser Faktoren für seine Entwicklung und Lehre:
eine historisch-psychiatrische Studie, 2 vols (vol. 1, Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard,
1937; vol. 2, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1941).
238 Lyndal Roper
37. Preserved Smith, “Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psycho-Analysis,” The
American Journal of Psychology 24(3) (July 1913), 360–377.
38. Preseved Smith, The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (London: John Murray, 1911).
39. See Smith, “Luther’s Early Development,” 363, esp. n. 13; it is now possible to trace these
references more systematically than was possible when Smith wrote: WA TR 1, No. 183,
82.13–18; WA TR 3, No. 3665,501.4–502.7; WA TR 4, No. 4354; and WA TR 4, No. 5100,
664.26–32 may be an indirect reference to the case; WA TR 5, No. 6016, 439.7–30.
40. Their marriage should also therefore stand. It was in fact a double incest case, and the
fault was not the son’s but the mother’s, who, when her son asked to sleep with the
maid, had taken her place, because she was convinced (wrongly as it turned out) that
he was too young to have procreative sex. She raised the resulting daughter, took her on
as her maid, and it was she whom the son then married. Sometimes the point Luther
makes in the telling the story is that it is the mother’s fault—certainly Luther is com-
pletely nonjudgmental about the young man’s sexuality.
41. Luther did not approve the public wedding and recommended bigamy only as a private,
secret solution, but the publicity of the wedding ensured a major scandal. See, on Lutheran
views of bigamy and princes, Paula Sutter Fichtner, Protestantism and Primogeniture in Early
Modern Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
42. Marjorie E. Plummer, “‘The Much Married Michael Kramer’: Evangelical Clergy and
Bigamy in Ernestine Saxony, 1522–1542,” in Marjorie E. Plummer and Robin Barnes,
eds., Ideas and Cultural Margins: Essays in Honor of H.C. Erik Midelfort (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing, 2009); “‘Partner in his Calamities’: Pastors’ Wives, Married Nuns and the
Experience of Clerical Marriage in the Early German Reformation,” Gender & History
20.2 (2008), 207–227.
43. Though Spalatin, for one, later guessed Luther wrong—he allowed a pastor to marry
incestuously, to Luther’s complete outrage—the loss of Luther’s good opinion precip-
itated a depression and overshadowed his last years: Roper, “To His Most Learned.”
On Luther’s views of marriage and family, see the very helpful collection by Susan
C. Karant-Nunn and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ed. and trans., Luther on Women. A Source
Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
44. Georg Spalatin, “Chronicon sive Annales Georgii Spalatini . . . ,” in Johann Mencke, ed.,
Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, præcipue Saxonicarum, in quibus Scripta et Monumenta illus-
tria, pleraque hactenus inedita, 3 vols (Leipzig: Martini, 1728–30), vol. 2, col. 592–593.
45. Vandiver, Keen, and Frazel, Luther’s Lives (Melanchthon), 21.
46. Vandiver, Keen, and Frazel, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 91–92.
47. Cochlaeus describes the incident at length in Colloquium Cochlaei cum Luthero Wormatiae
olim habitum (1521), ed. Joseph Greving, in Otto Clemen, ed., Flugschriften aus den
ersten Jahren der Reformation. Bd. 4.Hft. 4, Halle 1907–11, 1910 (Reprint Nieuwkoop:
B. de Graaf, 1967), esp. 197–206 and on the reaction, Cochlaeus, Colloquium, Greving,
“Introduction,” 184; Martin Spahn, Johannes Cochlaeus: Ein Lebensbild aus der Zeit der
Kirchenspaltung (Berlin: Verlag von Felix L. Dames, 1898), 86–89, and Vandiver, Luther’s
Lives (Cochlaeus), 91–92.
48. Ralph Keen, “Johannes Cochlaeus: An Introduction to His Life and Work,’ in Vandiver,
Luther’s Lives, 42; Spahn, Johannes Cochlaeus, 339.
49. WA 11, 292–293.
50. “Jch will hinfort dem Cochläo auf kein Buch, wider mich geschrieben, antworten; so
wird er viel zorniger werden; denn da ich ihm antworten würde, so würde er stolz.
Und wills darum thun, auf daß er nicht die Ehre erlange, die er durch mein Schreiben
suchet.” WA TR 3, No. 3367, p. 294.23–25.
51. He extended the attack to include Luther’s followers, mounting a campaign against
Justus Jonas, and then the Anabaptists, arguing that the Münster Anabaptists were sim-
ply drawing the consequences of Luther’s teachings: Spahn, Johannes Cochlaeus, 183.
52. Many of which, including his Colloquium, were published by his relatives or paid for by
himself, Greving, “Introduction,” in Cochlaeus, Colloquium, 188.
53. Johannes Cochlaeus, Sieben Koepffe Martini Luthers (Leipzig: Valentin Schumann, 1529).
Cochlaeus had the propagandist’s instinct. Like Luther he knew how to make use of
popular culture, but unlike Luther, his attacks often misfired. His response to Luther’s
“Armed Monk” was to address Luther as the “monstrous minotaur”—which he intended
as a clever reference to the “monk calf,” the monstrous animal found in the Elbe, which
looked as if it had a cowl, and which was at first used by Luther’s opponents as a sign
against the reformer. But this offered an open goal to Cochlaeus’s enemies, who joked
that every minotaur has its Theseus. In any case, Luther had brilliantly turned the
“monk calf” into a propaganda coup, combining it in a jointly authored pamphlet with
Melanchthon on the Papal Ass to present an interpretation of the Monk Calf as a divine
sign against monasticism.
54. WA TR 2, No. 2258a, 2258b, 381.20–23; 382.12–14—Luther also quipped that it was a
“sin and shame, that the seven heads couldn’t even get hold of a single neck,” WA TR 2,
No. 2258a, 2258b, p. 381.8–10; 17–20; p. 382.9–12—and in fact the image shows virtu-
ally no neck at all, the heads sprouting like warts from the massive shoulders.
55. He did not come from an intellectual background but was of peasant stock; and he
notes that Luther’s background was “plebeian,” just as he might have described him-
self. The word he uses is “plebeios,” Commentaria Ioannis Cochlaei, De Actis et scriptis
Martini Lvtheri saxonis . . . , facsimile edition Farnborough 1968, p. 1. See Spahn, Johannes
Cochlaeus, 3–4. A well-meaning uncle who was a priest arranged for his education, but
the ungrateful Cochlaeus thought the instruction so bad that it delayed his academic
progress. In fact the two men’s social backgrounds were different since on Luther’s
mother’s side there were university-educated relatives, and Luther’s father was, we now
know, not a miner who clawed his way up to become mayor of Mansfeld but a man of
substantial means from the outset. Fessner, “Die Familie Luder.”
56. Greving, “Introduction,” in Cochlaeus, Colloquium, 182–183.
57. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives, 35 (Melanchthon), 84–93, esp. 91–93 (Cochlaeus); the main
Lutheran printed pamphlet account of Luther at Worms which circulated at the time
is similar to Melanchthon’s reminiscence, mentioning Cochlaeus’s noisy interruptions
and his attempt to get Luther to give up his safe conduct, WA 7, 814–857, 850–851.
Myconius does not mention him at all in his narrative of the events at Worms, but
has an earlier brief chapter dismissing Emser and the “bös zorning Göckelmännlein”
Cochlaeus (Myconius, Geschichte, 33). Cochlaeus’s obsession with Luther finds
its strangest form in his adulation of Melanchthon, Luther’s close co-worker. He
later turned against Melanchthon too, penning a seven-volume Philippic based on
Cicero and Demosthenes that was designed to refute Melanchthon point for point;
Johannes Cochlaeus, Philippicae I–VII, ed. with intro and commentary by R. Keen,
2 vols (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1995); Cochlaeus, Colloquium Cochlaei cum Luthero. On
Cochlaeus’s attitude to Melanchthon, see Spahn, Johannes Cochlaeus, 166–191.
58. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 59, 64
59. Ibid., 101.
60. It was published under the pseudonym of Johann Vogelsang (Cochlaeus), “Ein heimlich
Gespräch von der Tragedia Johannis Hussen, 1538,” in ed. Hugo Holstein, Flugschriften
aus der Reformationszeit 17 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1900). See, on the play, Philip Haberkern,
“‘After Me There Will Come Braver Men’: Jan Hus and Reformation Polemics in the
1530s,” German History (2009), 27 (2): 177–195, whose work first alerted me to the exist-
ence of the play.
61. See esp. Cochlaeus, “Ein Heimlich Gespräch,” 24–31.
62. In fact the Agricolas had lived with the Luthers when they first arrived from Eisleben,
so the girl would have known what Katharina looked like—but Cochlaeus is using this
as a dramatic device, introducing the characters to the audience through Agricola’s wife
and daughter; it is not proof that he was misinformed.
63. Ibid., 30.
64. Ibid., 32–34.
65. Hasenberg, Lvdvs Lvdentem Lvdervm Lvdens; Simon Lemnius, Lutii Pisaei Iuvenalis
Monachopornomachia, n. pl. n. d. [c. 1540].
66. WA TR 1, No. 798, 378.7 He also punned on “cohlear” or “spoon,” calling him
“Kochlöffel” or “cooking spoon” as well.
240 Lyndal Roper
67. Luther, Adversus armatum virum Cokleum, Wittenberg 1523, also WA 11, 292–306: the
title page and in some editions the final page has variations on the motto “Colum
decent mulieres. Et Colus decet mulieres,” in the German version, where the pun does
not work, “Aim weyb stat ein rogk woll an,” 293–294.
68. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up. Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford
69. Cochlaeus wrote Duke George of Saxony’s Honourable and Thorough Apology against Martin
Luther’s Seditious and Mendacious Letter and Vindication and Luther replied, The Small
Reply to Duke Geoge’s Latest Book, Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, 3 vols, trans. James L.
Schaaf (Minneapolis, 1985–93), vol. 3, 65–74.
70. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 91–92.
71. Ibid., 84; Cochlaeus, Colloquium Cochlaei cum Luthero.
72. On Envy, see “Envy” in Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville, VA:
University of Virginia Press, 2012).
73. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 58; and see 62, where he accuses Luther of stirring
up popular envy against the pope; WA TR 1, No. 798, p. 377.24–378.16.
74. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 91.
75. Ibid., 152.
76. Rabus, Historien.
77. Mathesius, Historien, fo. CXXX v.
78. Vandiver, Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 110–111.
12
Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting
Library: Memory and Self in
Early Modern Autobiography
Katharine Hodgkin
Memory, in early modern usage, is a fundamental quality of the person.

Renaissance scholars inherited from medieval psychology the theory of the
“inward wits,” memory, understanding, and imagination (memoria, cogitatio,
phantasia).1 These three qualities constituted the human mind, establishing
the self with its singular memories, intellects, and fancies; the loss of memory
was thus in important ways a loss of the self. The phrase commonly used to
describe someone as being of sound mind was “in perfect sense and mem-
ory”; to remember accurately was to grasp the underpinning narrative that
held self together in time, and the loss of that narrative meant a collapse in
self-awareness, to the point where a person no longer knew who they were.2 A
memory text can thus be seen as a primary assertion of selfhood; not, as was
once thought, an expression of “Renaissance individualism,” but a manifes-
tation of a self-reflective, communicative subjectivity. Nor was this only an
intellectual model of the self. In spiritual terms, forgetfulness was repeatedly
invoked as not merely a temporary mishap but a basic flaw, a loss of right-
eousness: the injunction to remember was reiterated from the Old Testament
on, in a stream of devotional texts recommending the godly to remember
and reflect on instances of God’s providence in their lives and elsewhere.3
Memory was a means to spiritual growth; spiritual writing was saturated with
the language of memory and forgetting.4
Autobiographical writing, by definition, is a discourse of memory. However
complex and variegated the relation between the writer and the text, the
remembering self is fundamental to any form of self-narrative. Without a sub-
ject presumed to remember, no autobiography.5 The rise of autobiographical
writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England thus needs to be located
in relation to both memory and subjectivity. Early modern autobiographies are
241
242 Katharine Hodgkin
not only telling life stories; they illuminate a particular moment in the history
of the self, and indeed have been seen to play a central part in that history.6
From 1860, when Jacob Burckhardt published his Civilization of the Renaissance
in Italy, the rise of autobiography has been treated as a critical moment of tran-
sition in the evolution of the Western self. For Burckhardt, the autobiographies
of figures such as Benvenuto Cellini were evidence of the emergence of a new
kind of individual—autonomous, self-confident, self-aware.7 “Renaissance
individualism” dominated scholarship on the early modern period until
recent decades, when it gave way to an emphasis on self-fashioning, inward-
ness, and subjectivity, yet still today there remains a widespread consensus
that early modernity was a critical period in the evolution of selfhood, and
that the remembering subject is in some way paradigmatic of this transforma-
tion. New forms of self-consciousness are linked to their literary articulation:
the emergence of autobiographical and diary writing, the “inward voice” in
poetry, the growing importance of “character” in drama—all these are taken
to be evidence of a crucial shift in subjectivity and its representations.8
These new articulations of subjectivity are seen as on the way to modern
selfhood, not identical to it. Studies of early modern subjectivity emphasize its
otherness and the unfamiliarity of its contours. What we see in these autobiog-
raphies, diaries, poems, plays, it is argued, is not a protomodern individual, but
a self imagined through conceptual models now strange to us—the humoral
system, the theological stress on sin and salvation—and in relation to very dif-
ferent social and cultural relations and structures. A person who experiences
embodiment through the ebbs and flows of the gendered humoral body and
the performative logic of deference, and whose self-knowledge is articulated
through ideas of divine providence and hierarchical social and family struc-
tures, cannot be understood according to the categories through which we
organize our own notions of the self.
This perspective, which dominated early modern studies throughout the
1980s, has important consequences for the psychoanalysis-history connec-
tion, since it excludes as anachronistic any understanding of the human
that appears to override historical difference—most notably psychoanalysis.
Stephen Greenblatt, in an influential 1986 article on “Psychoanalysis and the
Early Modern,” argued that psychoanalytic theory is predicated on a subjectiv-
ity that at the time of the Renaissance was not yet fully present.9 Early modern
subjects, he insisted, are “prepsychoanalytic”; the “deep” subjectivity of the
Freudian self had not yet come into being. Greenblatt’s critique is not based on
the more familiar empirical challenge to psychoanalysis, that it derives from
and depends on a specific family structure and a constellation of relationships
that are themselves historically contingent, and so cannot be assumed in soci-
eties that structure such relationships differently. Rather, he suggests, interior-
ity itself is not a constant in human history. The psychoanalytic subject, all
inwardness and drives, divided between knowable and unknowable, and in
tension with its own desires, cannot be taken to exist before its time.10
Greenblatt’s attack on psychoanalysis as anachronistic was a product of
a particular moment in literary studies. Literary criticism, as it negotiated
the drastic transformations of poststructuralism, was particularly drawn to
Elizabeth Isham’s Everlasting Library 243
the critique of human nature. For the new historicist and cultural mate-
rialist critics of the 1980s, the idea of continuity between early modern
and modern was far less attractive than radical rupture; continuity became
associated with literary conservatism, essentialism, and the tendency to
see Shakespeare’s characters as eternal types of human truth. The move
away from the paradigm of “Renaissance individualism” in the early 1980s
focused on the volatility and mobility of early modern subjects, rather than
their self-consciousness and coherence: flexible, insecure, and ambitious,
the New Historicist subject was a man on the make, and what he was mak-
ing was versions of himself as much as money or career.11 At the same time
he was doing so in highly circumscribed ways. The stress placed by many
scholars—historians as well as literary critics—on the social construction
of the self highlighted the importance of ascribed identities, social expecta-
tions and affiliations, kinship and family, religious beliefs: a series of collec-
tive contexts within which the individual self came into being, and which
mark the Renaissance subject as no less a creature of community than his
or her medieval predecessor.12 The self-generated unique individual of the
Burckhardtian Renaissance, assertively confident and floating free of com-
munity ties, was thus transformed into a dissolving and endlessly refash-
ioned subject of culture, whose unstable identity was anchored only by the
claims of society and the dictates of power.
New-historicist characterizations of the early modern subject have sub-
sequently come to seem more the product of their own historical moment
than perhaps first appeared, emerging out of the political and theoretical
debates of the 1980s.13 As the high tide of new historicism receded from the
mid-1990s on, work on the history of the self and self-representation in this
period drew increasingly on the vocabulary of inwardness and interiority,
rather than focusing on the mutable surface.14 Historical work on the fam-
ily, meanwhile, has emphasized the extent to which early modern social
and kinship networks were driven by emotional connection as well as by
hierarchy, deference, and self-interest.15 The self may be socially constructed,
but it is not written on a blank page, as a pure effect of language and power.
Human beings negotiate with and respond to their circumstances in com-
plex and unpredictable ways, in the past as in the present, and that unpre-
dictability is, in part at least, a consequence of the force of emotion and
unconscious drives. Along with the increased interest in interiority and emo-
tion, psychoanalysis has thus had something of a revival in early modern
studies. This is connected with a broader cultural turn in early modern his-
tory: scholars working on the history of witchcraft, melancholia, dreams,
or the body, for example, have drawn on psychoanalytic understandings of
fantasy, mourning, and the unconscious to enrich their analyses.16 But it is
also associated with the increasing interest in the history of the self and of
self-representation, and a wish to move beyond social constructionist mod-
els of the self without reverting to the assumption of an unvarying human
nature and a secure and self-governing subjectivity.17 For of course psy-
choanalysis no less than deconstruction undoes the idea of a coherent and
authoritative self; and while an uncompromising insistence on the historical
constructedness of subjectivity is not easily reconcilable with the transhis-

torical, or superhistorical, psyche of psychoanalysis, to argue for the continu-
ity of psychic structures and processes—as psychoanalytic historians have
pointed out—is not to deny historical variations in the nature of subjectivity.
Early modern selves can be both strange to the point of incomprehensibility,
and suddenly, startlingly familiar; other, but not only other; and psychoa-
nalysis has offered insights into the articulations of likeness and difference,
as well as the fragility and contradictions of subjectivity.
However, this recent turn toward psychoanalysis in early modern studies
(even among some new-historicist scholars who would once have been consider-
ably resistant to it) should not be overstated. A more prominent recent tendency
has been an increased focus on textuality as the key to understanding the early
modern self. The formation of selfhood, in all its modalities, is seen by many
literary scholars as a function of genre; as Michelle Dowd and Julia Eckerle put
it, “textual form and the subjectivity it produces are mutually constitutive.”18
The idea that the difference between early modern and modern selves is best
understood by way of the relationship between self and self-writing, that the
forms in which the self is narrated articulate and indeed perhaps generate a spe-
cific understanding and experience of the self, is widespread; indeed, as Gregory
Brown points out in a recent review article, much recent work on life-writing
suggests more or less explicitly that “not only can the self not be distinguished
from the representation of it, but the autonomous self does not exist prior to or
outside the representation of it.”19 The basic premise is that we can read sub-
jectivity through genre, and that one of the ways in which Renaissance and
early modern selves demonstrate their otherness to the modern is in the very
different modes of self-writing current at the time, not only in recognizably
autobiographical narratives but in multiple and often surprising locations. Thus
Adam Smyth’s recent study, Autobiography in Early Modern England, is a compel-
ling exploration of forms of self-writing that conspicuously do not include any-
thing traditionally understood as autobiography: from parish records to account
books, he traces the inscription of the self in unfamiliar locations. Dowd and
Eckerle’s Genre and Women’s Life Writing similarly includes discussion of letters,
poems, recipes, and early novels under the “life writing” rubric, as well as of
diaries and more conventional autobiographical writings.
This notion of selfhood as a function of literary genre has had important
consequences for ideas about early modern subjectivity. With the disman-
tling of the notion of individualism as a Renaissance characteristic, new
forms of self-writing are now left to carry the burden of novelty: if there is
a “new” subjectivity emerging in this period, it is seen as traceable above all
in the appearance of new genres in which to articulate it. The extension of
these “new genres” from the familiar forms of diary and autobiography into
more diverse and less purposively self-focused texts changes the nature of the
self we are looking at. In place of the “Renaissance individual,” the bounded
authoritative self who writes the chronological narrative of his important life,
or indeed the knowing, self-interrogative, self-dramatizing subject of solilo-
quy, such inclusive, open readings offer multiple meanings and fragmented
and decentered selves—but selves nonetheless. If earlier explorations of the

new subjectivity were focused on the elite male, this move is democratizing,
focusing particularly on women’s writing, and also on the common citizen:
self-consciousness is not the privilege of the educated.20 The commonplace
book, dispersed, collectively constituted, chronologically and spatially inter-
mittent, could be said to have replaced the autobiographical narrative as the
exemplary text of early modern subjectivity.21
At the same time, however, autobiographical narrative itself in this period
has been radically redefined. A key aspect of this, since the mid-1980s, has
been the attention devoted to spiritual autobiography, in particular the
printed autobiographies that emerged from the dissenting churches of the
English revolution and its aftermath.22 This focus has given a particular slant
to the story of autobiography and the self in the seventeenth century; for the
structure and expectations of what constitutes a life in such writing suggest a
model of the self that is often strange to us. Inwardly focused, telling the story
of the relation to God, these accounts largely dispense with what we might
regard as normal biographical details (childhood, marriage, family, work, for
example). The drama narrated is that of the spiritual self, and the relationship
that counts is the relationship to God; in comparison to this, earthly infor-
mation, “Experience . . . of the World,” is irrelevant at best, “too low for them
[saints] to spend much of their precious time and thoughts about,” as the
Baptist Jane Turner puts it.23 Such narratives reflect not so much what people
remember of their own lives, as what they think worth remembering and
committing to paper; and also, of course, what their editors and publishers
will approve, and what their readers wish to know. The print culture of early
modern Protestantism (in all its varieties) promoted specific ways of writ-
ing about the self, with the emphasis on sin, suffering, and redemption; and
the radical churches of the mid-to-late seventeenth century, through which
many of these accounts were published, also exercised their own controls.24
But this is only part of the story of the autobiographical self in this period.
If we take the printed spiritual autobiography as our model of early autobio-
graphical narrative, then we can indeed extrapolate from its generic features a
particular historical version of the self. But if we consider manuscript autobi-
ographies, whether spiritual or secular, the picture of the general characteris-
tics of early modern autobiography changes significantly. The earliest English
manuscript autobiographies date from the sixteenth century, predating the
appearance of print autobiographies by 70 or 80 years; Thomas Whythorne’s
narrative, written in the 1560s, is perhaps the earliest.25 The surviving manu-
scripts are almost entirely written by members of the gentry and above.26
They are generally longer, sometimes much longer, than print. They are also
much more likely to include significant amounts of personal detail, to give
information about family, courtship, employment, pastimes, reading, and so
forth. They are normally written for a limited audience: family members,
friendship circles, occasionally for manuscript circulation in a slightly wider
group. In contrast to the printed spiritual autobiographies, where dissenting
churches impose variably strict conventions to be followed, and entry into
the public domain brings its own constraints, there is a degree of autonomy
in the writing of manuscript narratives. The writers have a real though not
unlimited license to follow their memories in the ways that they prefer; and
their manuscripts are in some cases immensely detailed acts of memory.27
As Peter Burke has observed, “It is obviously dangerous to argue from the
rarity of ego-documents before 1500 that self-consciousness was undevel-
oped, since modern Western links between writing and self-examination
are not universal”; by the same token we should be cautious in reading sub-
jectivity from genre.28 The coexistence of such different autobiographical
forms invites us to revisit the articulations of genre, memory, and self in early
modern writing. Manuscript autobiographies that offer a rich and detailed
representation of personal and emotional lives suggest a different view of
what is significant in the making of a person, what is worth remembering, to
that implied by the print spiritual autobiographies, or by the many different
modes of self-representation identified by modern scholarship. If these mem-
ory texts are so strikingly different from the mass of spiritual autobiographies
in their structure and their preoccupations, might this change our notion of
early modern subjectivity, or generic conventions, or—if the two are indeed
inseparable—both? In the remainder of this chapter I turn to a specific exam-
ple in order to address these questions: the autobiographical writings of an
early seventeenth-century gentlewoman, Elizabeth Isham.
Elizabeth Isham, eldest daughter of a pious and prosperous Midlands gentry
family with a strong educational and writing culture, was born in 1609, and at
her death in 1654 left a number of autobiographical and other writings.29 The
longest of these, her Booke of Rememberance, is located in Princeton University
Library; other autobiographical papers, including drafts of passages from the
Princeton MS, are held in the wider family archive at Northamptonshire
Record Office.30 The Booke of Rememberance was written at the end of the
1630s, when Isham was around 30 years old. It is an unusually full and inti-
mate account of her life in her family: spiritual development, and devotional
reading, but also her childhood, family illnesses and deaths, food and drink,
needlework, other reading (mainly poetry), her studies, her father’s attempts
to get her married and her resistance to this (eventually successful), and much
else. Along with this confessional narrative, however, Isham left another, very
different, memory text, in which she lays out her life not as a sequential nar-
rative but as a spatial depiction on a single sheet of paper; this manuscript,
covering much the same period as her Booke, offers an alternative and much
less familiar view of her past. Isham’s representations of herself and others
in these two documents of the self are strikingly untypical answers to the
question of what is seen as worth remembering by early modern writers, both
in the forms in which she records her memories, and in her exceptionally
detailed and rich account of her childhood memories and relationships. Her
two sharply contrasted memory texts raise significant questions about the
connections between subjectivity and genre; at the same time her intensely
emotional account of her family relationships, especially with her brother and
sister, offers another kind of insight into early modern subjectivity.
Elizabeth Isham: Memory, Childhood, Loss
What are the contexts for Elizabeth Isham’s act of memory? Her first motive
for writing, as she declares at the opening, is the classic one of the spiritual
imperative, juxtaposing memory as duty with forgetfulness as failure: “there-
fore will I tell of thy wonderous workes that the memoriall of thine abundant
kindnes may never be forgotten” she writes, addressing God; “forsake me not
but untill that I have decleared thine arme unto this generation and thy power
to them that shall come” (2r). Then she adds a marginal note specifying in
less expansive terms the audience she has in mind, and putting her account
into immediate relation to her family: “not that I intend to have this pub-
lished but to this end . . . for my own benefit which if it may doe my Brother
or his Children any pleasure I think to leave it them” (2r). Lineage and family
continuity are important elements in her own reflections; she prays that her
brother may some day have a male heir to preserve the family name, after the
death of his wife and son in childbed, and in the final pages of her account
she thinks back to the delight she had in childhood “to heare old stories of my
Gran-fathers and Gran-mothers related to me by my Nurs. who was a young
Servant in the house; when my father was borne” (38r). The act of writing
and remembering, intimately tied once again to the family culture, generates
more memories; it becomes a pleasure, an act of renewal—”the rememberance
hereof I have found so profitable that me thinkes my Youth is renued” (38r),
she declares—even if (as she also notes) tiring, and taking much longer than
she had expected.
This emphasis on the pleasures of memory is the more striking because in
her childhood it had been a source of jealousy and insecurity in relation to
her siblings. In an early passage she describes herself in childhood by way of
contrasts with her brother and sister:
my sister had the florishingest memory . . . this differance of disposition

was betwexts us. my brother naturally loved his Booke learning rising
sooner to goe to scool then many times some would have him; likewise I
naturally followed to learn my worke, till many times my mother would
wish me to give over; my sister willingly would not lerne her worke, for the
onely trad of her way was in reading her booke. for which she was much
commended and for her memorie I was somthing cast downe that my selfe
was no better regarded . . . (12r)
Elizabeth’s great natural gift is for needlework; her brother Justinian loves to
study, and is eager to go to school; her sister Judith has the best memory, and
is also drawn to study, but is not at all keen on needlework. These are given
qualities, differences of disposition, as she calls them. Although she presents
them as neutral, they are not: in her household (she was possibly unlucky here)
reading and memorizing is more to be commended than skill in needlework,
even in girls.31 And significantly, she records the emotional impact of this
hierarchy; she is cast down, and feels she is not valued. Indeed, this is not
the only time she describes this particular dynamic. A few pages earlier she
gives a very similar summary: “I was naturally a child apt to my worke but
my Sister, was redier at her Booke, and althought my parents did commend
me yet they would say that she had chosen the better part, and indeed she
was of a riper wit so was also my Brother who did far excell me in the desire
of knowledge . . . ” (5v). The emotional importance of this difference is under-
lined by repetition: she and her sister are positioned as Martha and Mary, and
Mary undoubtedly has the better part.
In contrast to the anxieties she experienced over memory in her child-
hood, however, when she is the only one left to remember her own memory
becomes a source of wonder; as she exclaims, addressing God:
likewise I have admired the memory. as a mervelous worke of thine. that I

should utterly forget those things which at another time have come freshly
to me. besides for the multiplicity a thing O my God to be amazed at hav-
ing in us astwere an everlasting libreary . . . (32r)
This declaration, although it echoes a famous image in Augustine’s Confessions

(an important model for Isham), is made with the force of a personal revelation:
how astonishing that memory can be so active, so unpredictable, so uncontrol-
lable, and yet so full of pleasures. Memory, the source of childhood struggles
and competition, has eventually become its own reward, an everlasting library,
endlessly renewed. Her final lines evoke once again the relation of memory and
forgetting to God: “if I forget thee, O my God. let my right hand forget her cun-
ning. I cannot wish a greater evill to my selfe then to forget thee” (38r).32
Isham’s narrative positions her within her family culture, reflecting forward
and backward, but focusing above all on horizontal relationships. Her siblings
Judith and Justinian, very close to her in age (“being all borne in tow yeare,”
as Isham says [3r]) and both suffering from poor health as children, are power-
ful emotional and imaginative presences throughout her account, in relation
to whom she understands and defines herself. This is in sharp contrast to the
general lack of interest in childhood shown by the majority of spiritual auto-
biographers, especially, as noted earlier, in the printed accounts. Childhood
is largely excluded from published autobiography, both by the conventions
of the genre and by a different conception of the place of childhood in the
narrative of a life. For many writers childhood is autobiographically signifi-
cant primarily to the extent that it foreshadows some future spiritual direc-
tion. Childhood memories are recorded as signs of God’s mercy or his future
intent, not as explanations of adult character; and more often than not such
recollections are entirely absent.33 And while Isham’s close recollection of her
childhood seems to give her narrative a different and more modern status, it is
nonetheless still embedded in a providential and Augustinian framework. She
does not recall her childhood in order to reflect on the adult she later becomes,
or to understand herself more fully, but to demonstrate divine goodness.
But while generic conventions govern its representation, this is not to say
childhood was lived generically. Those writers who do record childhood
memories, even briefly, often do so in ways that register their psychological
importance as both memory and experience; childhood emerges as a period

of powerful emotions and intense relationships, no less than it is today.
Unquestionably the differences in terms of childrearing practices, family size
and structure, intimacy and hierarchy, are of great significance in shaping the
experience of early modern childhood, as are conceptions of the nature of the
child—a point I return to later. And yet notwithstanding these differences,
what emerges from Isham’s narrative is also the psychological importance of
primary relationships, and the continuing force of childhood memories in
adult life. Isham’s detailed recreation of her childhood emotions and rela-
tionships not only praises divine benevolence toward her, but holds in place
her earliest memories, along with those who were part of them and are now
gone. Her memory text is—as she calls it—a book of remembrance, a memo-
rial to the lost household of her childhood.
The dominant mode of the Isham household, in Elizabeth’s narrative, is
one of feminine spirituality and sickness: afflictions of body and soul circu-
late among the women of the house. Mother and grandmother are both sick
for much of Elizabeth’s childhood, with those mysterious early modern ill-
nesses involving fits and speechlessness and swooning, before both dying dur-
ing her adolescence. Judith, her younger sister, has broken bones, which set
badly, and suffers lifelong pain and discomfort. Even Elizabeth, who refers
frequently to her own health and strength, suffers from wind colic, sudden
attacks of blindness, coughs, and hoarseness.34 Her mother spends several
years in the grip of spiritual affliction, diagnosed by some as melancholy;
Elizabeth and her sister both suffer in turn from greensickness, Elizabeth after
her grandmother’s death and Judith after her mother’s; Judith at one point is
diagnosed with the mother—hysteria—although Elizabeth is skeptical about
the diagnosis. Elizabeth undergoes periods of melancholy, though she com-
ments that because of her disposition “mallancholy hath never don me much
harme or wrot those strong efects in me as in some of lightsomer dispositions”
(18r). Both she and her sister also experience periods of spiritual desolation,
suffering the familiar range of fear of damnation, temptations to curse God,
and self-hatred (her brother, she mentions, also suffers from some degree but
being a man is better able to cope with it). Physical and spiritual sufferings
constantly intertwine, along with endless efforts at cure: courses of physic,
detailed by Elizabeth in marginal notes; good books; the counsel of friends
and ministers; prayer. There are very few points in the narrative where every-
one in the household is well and happy.35 And yet she insists repeatedly that
she loves a private life above all, that she wishes only to stay with her family,
and never marry. The intimate, enclosed culture of the family keeps her in a
tight bond, above all with her sister, whose death in 1636 was a terrible blow.
The exceptional level of detail in her mapping of the emotional tone of the
household, of her feelings about her siblings, her parents, her grandmother,
thus needs to be read in the context of repeated losses. When Elizabeth comes
to write her book her grandmother, mother, and sister are all dead, as is her
sister-in-law (her brother’s wife), and she is effectively the last female member
of her family apart from her two small nieces. Her narrative commemorates
a lost domestic culture of reading, prayer, and needlework, and the family
members who meant most to her. The idea of writing her confessions, indeed,
seems to have first emerged in conversation with her sister: “I told her,” writes
Isham, “that I thought she and I had as much experience of affliction both
in my mother & our selves as but few had and it came into my mind not to
let thy goodnesse and mercie towards my mother die in oblivion” (30r). The
godly line from which she comes, the virtues of grandmother, mother and
sister, are recollected and repeated, rescued from oblivion. Commemoration
is thus a central element in her memory text.
Nonetheless the picture that she draws is not an idealized one; on the con-
trary, the focus on domestic tensions is part of what gives her narrative its
particular depth. Isham reflects not only on her own sins and faults, but at
times, in more or less coded ways, on those of other members of her family. The
intensity with which she describes her relationships with her brother and sister
in particular articulates complex bonds of likeness and difference, hostility and
love, in ways that recall Juliet Mitchell’s description of sibling relationships,
pulled between the “ecstasy of loving someone who is like oneself” and “the
trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one’s place.”36 Sibling rela-
tionships in early modern culture often serve as an idealized model of friend-
ship, in which the vocabulary of sisterhood or brotherhood articulates ideals
of intimacy, trust, and communion; the duty of love and care to siblings, as to
other kin, may frequently fall short in practice, but it is constantly reiterated in
early modern texts. But early modern writers were also alive to the ambiguities
of the relation, and all too aware that brothers and sisters can be hostile as well
as loving. The author of The Whole Duty of Man (1658) thus insists on the need
for brothers and sisters to love one another precisely because there seems good
cause to expect the opposite, in a seventeenth-century domestic space pictured
as always on the verge of dissension and jealousy:
This kindness and love between brethren and sisters ought to be very
firmly grounded in their hearts; if it be not, they will be of all others in
most danger of disagreeing; for the continual conversation that is among
them, while they are at home in their father’s house, will be apt to min-
ister some occasion to jar. Besides, the equality that is among them with
respect to birth, often makes them inclinable to envy each other, when
one is in any respect advanced above the other. . . . Therefore, for the pre-
venting such temptations, let all who have brethren and sisters, possess
their minds with a great and real kindness to them, look on them, as parts
of themselves . . . 37
The demand that siblings should look on one another as “parts of them-
selves” is constantly struggling with anger and envy; only a serious effort of
will can keep kindness and common interest to the fore. And it is striking
too that equality is the root of the problem. In the resolutely hierarchical and
gendered early modern family, the sibling position is an ambiguous one. It
is because siblings are all born at the same level—in terms of rank, that is,
regardless of their position within the family—that they are subject to envy.
Envy is exacerbated by the tension between equality and hierarchy. Brothers

and sisters form a group, generationally cohesive and linked by blood, irre-
spective of any other differences; but it is this very likeness that opens the
way to bitterness and rivalry.
It is thus hardly surprising, whether sibling relationships are considered as
constant human bonds or as specific historical formations, that Isham’s narra-
tive is permeated by anxiety and at times competition around the question of
who is best loved. When the three were very small, she tells us, “many times I
should be dejected suppossing my mother loved my Sister better, because sum
told her she was like her . . . ” (3v), although she goes on to note that she failed
to take into account her sister’s poor health, which might explain her mother’s
gentleness to her. In reflecting on the sins of envy and want of love, she draws
examples from her childhood: “I should be too glad when my Sister hath bin
found in a fault; that my selfe might apeare the better” (9r). She describes a
brief period of success, as it were, when her mother is unwell and unhappy,
and Elizabeth manages to find appropriate biblical passages to read to her, thus
making herself the favored companion for a time: “by this meanes,” she says,
“I had gotten the better hand of my sister who now was cast downe as much
as my selfe . . . ” (12r), although she adds that this was not her intention—“it
was not my policy to please my mother to get my sister out of favour” (12v).
She evokes these envious moments as illustrations of her childhood sins and
foolishness, of course, and carefully specifies that it was not her parents who
encouraged competitiveness among their young. As she says, “my parents car-
ried themselves thus wisely towards us . . . that I never could here them say
which they loued best, but . . . they favoured us according as wee deserved; som-
times whissperings of servants would dejecte us (besides our owne sirmises)
talking which were loved best” (12v). But it is clearly a recurrent preoccupa-
tion, reinforced by insecurity not only over parental love but over parental
health. Her mother at this point had just spent a long period confined to
her chamber in a state of melancholy and spiritual affliction, and Elizabeth
had overheard servants saying that the children might be sent away, so, she
explains, “I though[t] to make my selfe sure with pleasing of her” (12r).
Competition between siblings for parental love is hardly unexpected in any
era. In early modern England such competition would be sharpened by the
expectation that good parents would not hesitate to point out their children’s
weaknesses and flaws, and would resort frequently to physical correction in
response. Elizabeth’s repeated insistence on her mother’s love and goodness
is in tension with her descriptions of punishment and fear (“feareing my par-
ents,” she tells God, “I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee” [4r]), even
while she approves in principle the need for such discipline. When Elizabeth
describes how her mother reduced the use of the rod as she grew older, her
account clearly implies that the beatings were beneficial for neither of them:
I growing somthing big my mother tooke a more favorable way with

mee then before she had don. when she had her maid to hold me while
she gave me correction and though she was a weake women, yet being
somthing moved with passion she did her sefe I suppose harm and me
no good, though I conffes I did deserve her correction, and therefore it
was due to me, and though my mother did well in so doeing, yet she did
better afterward in moderating her selfe . . . (10r)
Instead of beating her, Elizabeth’s mother took to hiding her face behind her
fan to signify displeasure, motivating her daughter to seek to please, rather
than to fear; and the duties Elizabeth was given in place of beatings, she
explains, “I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with
mee” (10v). This critical perspective on a mother who is immoderate and pas-
sionate in her beatings, who damages herself with excessive emotion, emerges
with unexpected sharpness in the approving account of how she becomes a
mother who governs both herself and her daughter better; at the same time
the convoluted syntax and equivocations in the passage quoted are reminders
of the difficulty of taking up such a position.38
Similarly, in tension with her insistence that her parents showed all their
children equal favor is the recurrent anxiety over who loves whom best, an
issue very often posed as one of likeness. Her sister and mother, she repeat-
edly stresses, are like one another, and she is different; she has, she says, “not
that quicknes of Spirit like her or my sister” (17v); they are variously described
as “lightsome” (13r), “affable,” “witty” (13r). Her brother also shares these
qualities, both of them having “good parts and livlinesse of spirit,” more than
Elizabeth does (25r). This makes for particular bonds; not only does Elizabeth
as a child fear her mother prefers her sister because of their likeness, but love
is repeatedly predicated on similarity. Her sister Judith in adulthood tells her
about her feelings for their brother:
she would tell me she was most like him. and that she loved him better
then she did me. but I said I was contented she should. I knew she loved
me well too, and my selfe loved her never a whit the worse, for so say-
ing or dooing and I was glad that she had such comfort of my Brother . . .
(24v–25r)
This of course is the adult Elizabeth, who cannot any longer represent herself
as tied to her childhood jealousies (though their persistence into adulthood is
confirmed in her sister’s startling confession that in her state of melancholy
she was tempted not only by suicide but by sororicide—”she was tempted to
make me away sleeping by her” (24v); Elizabeth was evidently not alone in
the intensity and ambivalence of her emotions). She represents herself as cut
off from this group of lively, quick-witted people with good memories. Her
mother comments on her “heavenes,” and suggests that perhaps because she
was born on a Saturday she is under the dominion of Saturn (17v).39 Her love
of being alone also confuses, and her preference for saying prayers in pri-
vate: “I remember my mother told my father one day of all the Children she
had she knew the lest of my dispotition” (17v). Difference does not prevent
affection, of course. Describing her mother and grandmother, Elizabeth

emphasizes their closeness despite their different characters:
they lived and loved together the best that I knew any mother and daugh-
ter in-law, although difference there betwext them both in age and dispo-
sition. my Granmother being of a grave sollid nature and my mother of a
lively lightsom spirit. (10v)
But similarity is repeatedly seen to strengthen the bonds of love. Elizabeth

herself mourned particularly for her grandmother, because “I was like her
and because of that true content I had with being with her”—something she
describes as “a secret sympothise in nature” (17r).
The family roles, then, are established as on the one hand the lively mother,
brother, and sister; on the other hand the graver and more private Elizabeth
and her grandmother. Her father, by contrast, she never describes in these
terms of disposition or likeness; he seems in certain ways separate from this
family group, although Elizabeth is keen to emphasize his love and care for
them. He is concerned with their spiritual education when they are children,
giving them Bibles and hearing them repeat sermons, and he is occasionally
ill; but generally he seems to live apart from the intensely connected world of
his female relatives. While her mother was suffering from spiritual affliction,
her father is blamed by some of their neighbors for not letting her go out; this
is indignantly refuted by Elizabeth, who insists on her father’s generosity and
concern, although her description of this gives a brief and rather desolating
hint that he and her mother may not have been altogether well matched:
“some said,” she comments, “that he was hard to her but not so but that one
of a more sparing dissposition might have had enough . . . ” (11v). Her mother’s
disposition is not sparing; “she was,” the passage continues immediately, “of
a Noble free nature, and very Charitable to the poore” (11v).40 Implicitly, her
father’s control—financial or otherwise—is damaging; there are further hints
of this later in relation to Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth’s long resistance to her
father’s wish that she should marry is another source of tension, and indeed
another motive for writing her account; she indicates a wish to explain and
justify her actions as she cannot do face to face: “I tolde my Sister it may be
I will writ somwhat to leave my mind to my friends when I die. to give them
satisfaction. which I thought I ought to doe especially to my father. which
otherwise I could not so well expresse . . . ” (30r). Elizabeth’s account of the
various marriage negotiations, and her extraordinarily lengthy explanations
of her feelings about them, do seem to suggest that she felt the need to justify
her choices; but her reserved and cautious portrayal of her father is probably
also to do with the fact that he was still alive as she wrote her narrative.
Isham’s picture of the emotional dynamics of family life is at once star-
tlingly recognizable and also oddly alien. In very modern style, Elizabeth is
concerned not only to describe these dynamics, but also to interpret them:
she is the analyst of her family’s collective identity, explaining sympathies
and antagonisms through a set of assumptions about what makes relation-

ships easy or difficult. People who are alike like one another. Children have
different talents and preferences, and these need to be encouraged and val-
ued. Parents need to treat their children equally, although their children will
suffer from jealousy despite their best efforts. Parents should exercise disci-
pline, but in a calm and not a passionate way. At the same time, however, she
is working with distinctively seventeenth-century (or premodern) ideas about
the self and how it develops. For the last two hundred years or more child-
hood experiences have been located as the fundamental matrix of character,
the place of origin of our adult selves, even if qualified by notions of inherited
or innate characteristics. For Isham, however, as noted earlier, character is
not explained by childhood. The differences between herself and her siblings
are fixed: they are not the result of parental behavior or early life experi-
ences (though the discourse of likeness suggests that heredity is significant),
but of given dispositions, especially humoral.41 Humoral theory identifies
physical, emotional and intellectual predispositions, which upbringing may
modify but cannot fundamentally transform; parents would be advised to
plan for their child’s best health in relation to these general characteristics (so
Timothy Rogers in a late seventeenth-century treatise on melancholy urges
parents “not to put those Children, who are naturally Melancholly, to be Scholars,”
as it will only make the symptoms more pronounced), but a melancholy and
fearful child will not be turned into a sanguine one by kind treatment.42
This is not of course to say that in early modern culture there is no notion
of development of the self, or of the importance of working on the child in
order to produce the right kind of adult. Indeed, Renaissance theorists as well
as Renaissance parents were deeply interested in the ways in which childhood
could be trained, from all points of view.43 Children needed to be given good
wet nurses whose milk would not corrupt them, they needed to be trained to
say their prayers from when they were tiny, they needed to be taught correct
modes of behavior from a startlingly young age, they needed to have their
interests and dispositions correctly identified in order to lead them in the right
direction, and they needed to be whipped if they failed to observe obedience.
But alongside this there is a great deal of what we might call generic think-
ing about the self. Theologically, original sin fixes the meaning of childhood
misbehavior in a cosmological structure, which dictates appropriate responses
(sparing the rod and spoiling the child, primarily); and the behavior of all
children is seen as evidence of this. Children as a group have characteristic
features, and in their behavior exemplify the type Child as much as the indi-
vidual. They are both infinitely malleable, and fixed—by their bodies, by the
stars, by sin—in a set of behaviors and relationships that belong to their age,
and that they will discard as they reach more reasonable years.
Isham’s memory of her own childhood, recorded in rich affective detail, is
nonetheless characterized also by these generic modes of thought: her own
childhood exemplifies not only her specific family relationships, but God’s
purpose, original sin, the general qualities of natures such as her own. Even
infancy, “that time which now I cannot call to mind,” as Isham describes it,
“could not but be impure in thy sight seeing I was borne in iniquitie, and in
sinne conceived by my mother” (2v). Childhood allows for more active wick-
edness: “now will I confesse my Sinnes unto thee O Lord,” Isham declares,
“and my natureall Stubbernes of a Childe to my mother” (3r). It is both natu-
ral and sinful for a child to be stubborn to its mother, because the child is
born to sin; and she notes other natural childhood inclinations, some tend-
ing to sin (“it is the inclination of Children to be apt to learne that which is
not so good and to rejoyce in it” [7r]), some more neutral (“it being the nature
of Children to aske questions” [8v]). But children also have their own par-
ticular sins and qualities. Isham’s “evill inclinations” included covetousness
(desiring “vane things” when the servants came back from market), greed and
sloth (4v). She also remembers sharing a room with a little cousin who “was
very fearefull in the night crying out in his sleepe and saying his prayers”;
the small Elizabeth “called upon my Brother to rore as I did, to scare him.”
“O my God,” she adds, “pardon my faults . . . ” (4r). Talents, meanwhile, are
God-given, and pride in them is another sin (one should be thankful); but
God shares the credit with a notion of natural inclination: she “learned to
writ having a natureall inclinacion thereunto,” but she had no inclination
to learn to sing (5r). Needlework, her particular passion, invites more reflec-
tion. She remembers being taught by one of her mother’s waiting women, but
adds, “Little teaching served my turne. I know not what jenius led me to love
it so well . . . ” (9v)—a suggestion of pride in her gift that needs to be imme-
diately cancelled out in the succeeding passage by reference to her idleness
and her brittle memory. As ever, the memories are there to make a point: no
experience is without reference to God.
Isham’s memories of childhood thus summon up both generic and par-
ticular characteristics, shaped in her telling by the specific relationships and
emotions of her immediate family and household. But however vivid and
animating these memories are to the reader, they are not transparent. As
Margaret Ezell has pointed out, the place of memory in Isham’s narrative
remains troubled; doubts about accuracy are a recurrent feature, alongside
firm assertions of certainty.44 The evocation of memory as an everlasting
library, however intensely felt, carries many echoes, not least of St Augustine,
whose Confessions were a major influence on her book (which she also refers
to as her confessions), and who is often the subject of her marginal notes;
and not only memory itself but also the relation between a text and its pre-
cursors can make authenticity and accuracy problematic concepts. Another
significant episode she recollects from her childhood, relating to her “evill
inclinations” and general sinfulness, but in particular to greed and appetite,
illustrates this. It concerns the theft of fruit:
a lickorishnesse stole upon me to open my mothers cobord, she leting me

have a nether roome of it to my selfe, I longed to trie whether I could open
it with my key, which when I had found the way of it I tooke fruite from
thence, my mother having charged me with it I flatly denied it. and so
scaped both the shame of the fact and her anger, also my mother let me
keepe a closet to my selfe, wherein I kept pares to dish out for the table,
my father injoining me that I should eate no pares but they tempting me
every time I saw them. I should take one . . . but my conscience hath often
reproved me. for these and other small things . . . (10r)
One of the most celebrated passages in Augustine’s Confessions concerns his

theft of pears from an orchard when he was a boy, not because he was hungry
or in need of pears, but purely for the joy of stealing and being part of a group;
it is an act that generates pages of reflections on the nature of sin. This act is
replicated in Elizabeth’s recollection: the fruit, the theft, the betrayal of trust,
the eventual repentance—although in her case it is greed not love of theft that
motivates her, she acts alone, and repentance follows quickly. What it stands
for is original sin and the possibility of regeneration. In looking back over her
childhood sins and selecting one to stand for many, Augustine’s pears were
surely in her mind; the word “lickorishness,” used in the translation Isham
read in connection with the pear-stealing episode and apparently adopted by
her for her own equivalent moment, confirms this connection.45 Such epi-
sodes remind us that memory works through symbols and association; that
the act of remembering as much as the subsequent act of writing condenses,
highlights, suppresses, in generating its narrative, and what is remembered
does not necessarily reproduce what happened, in an exact sense.
Memory, Narrative, Self
If the distinctiveness of the retrospective self-narrative lies in part in its status

as a memory text, then, this needs to be qualified and treated with some cau-
tion. Not only the question of what is worth remembering and recording, but
also the question of how we remember and how memory represents the past,
ensure that the retrospect of the autobiographical narrative is never uncom-
plicated. Isham’s narrative is no more a spontaneous act of memory than any
other autobiography; it is carefully crafted, modeled on a specific text in its
formal as well as symbolic aspects, revised and rewritten over the course of
around two years. With its intense emotional dramas, its focus on the domes-
tic relationships that shape and direct her emotional life, it seems to prefigure
the recreation of childhood experience that characterizes so much autobio-
graphical writing in the modern era. And yet at the same time its motivation
is unambiguously spiritual: the story Isham wishes to tell is the Augustinian
one of her gradual opening toward God, and all her content is subservient
to this. The self that is being constructed in this narrative is inward-looking,
self-aware, and self-reflective, analytical and curious about its own qualities
and motives—modern, we might say; but it is also dedicated to its eventual
absorption into the divine, and Isham registers the struggles, griefs, and losses
of her life as so many staging posts on this journey—anything but modern
in its insistence on the sinfulness of the self and the necessity of suffering.
Isham’s account simultaneously seems to invite us to reflect on the shaping
of the subject by primary relationships—her parents, her siblings, along with
her wider household of grandmothers, aunts, and waiting women—and to
remind us constantly of the insufficiency of this model to grasp what she

intends in her autobiography.
Nor is it only in narrative form that Isham records her memories. Among
other family papers held in the Northampton record office is a radically dif-
ferent representation of her life, constructed not as a narrative but as a spa-
tially dispersed set of recollections. On a single sheet of paper folded so as to
make small rectangles, she records in each rectangle a summary of a year of
her life, in compressed and often cryptic notes. Written largely in the past
tense, this is another retrospective text. It begins in early childhood and con-
tinues through to 1648, six years before her death, briefly noting domestic
and family events, needlework projects, financial and spiritual activities, and
occasional national news. Among the entries for 1630, for example, we find:
“I steched me a pare of cuffs. my uncle S died next . . . there was sicknes at
London. M my uncle Pagit and his houshould came . . . I read Mr Smith ser-
mons which was borrowed. I made an end of my cut worke h{ . . . }and wore it
the next summer when I wrot the purls.” In the same year there are references
to visits from Mrs Dryden (Elizabeth’s father was then attempting to negoti-
ate her marriage into the Dryden family); brief reflections on attempting to
avoid pride; and in one of the longest single entries a combination of marital,
financial, and emotional issues, which cast light on some of the other com-
ments: “now my father thought to marry me, he setled a 100 { . . . } pounds a
yeare on my Sister Judeth for her life and she was heavy at it not desiring to
live longer I suppose than my father” (1630). There are varying levels of detail
in this manuscript. After a very brief account of her earliest years, in recol-
lecting her teens and twenties she becomes more discursive, at times writing
mini-paragraphs of half a dozen lines, especially when reflecting on spiritual
or moral issues. In 1635, for instance, she reflects on her changing religious
practice:
insted of often saying my catichisme I somtimes read of what might ben-

efit my soule . . . insted of saying my prayres . . . I thought of those Chapters
which I read and in sted of forcing my selfe to weepe which I thought came
not so clearly or purly as I did desire I examend my selfe at night what I
had don in the day. having paid {out?} and giving thanks and making
known my wants. (1635)
By the 1640s, however, her recollections are increasingly elliptical, and

indeed illegible: “father was ill. Taught my neece Gin to read. . . . Did
Nedle-work lace . . . I vomited . . . my Brother gave me a fan. I had a swarm at
Sue Allins. . . . made an end of my work of Solomon. the Rebelion in Ierland.”
(1641)—each of these points on a separate line. As she records writing her
Confessions in 1638, “which was my Chiefest work for this yere and almost
the next,” it may be that the briefer entries of the succeeding years reflect the
ending of her main memory project; her records become more cursory as her
attention moves elsewhere.
As a memory text this mode of self-writing has more in common with the
memory palace than the narrative autobiography, as Ezell points out.46 The
memory palace or theater, a celebrated classical model for the training of

memory, is an imagined space furnished with a series of objects or images, to
each of which the memorizer attaches a particular phrase, concept, or point
in an argument; in order to deliver the speech, the speaker moves in imagi-
nation from one object to the next, and each object provides the key to the
next point.47 Like the memory palace, Isham’s Northamptonshire manuscript
is spatial rather than chronological in organization, though there is a visible
temporal relationship between its rectangles. It gives the bare mnemonics,
which to the original maker would (at least in theory) open up recollection: a
phrase such as “mrs Driden came” would summon story and emotion, as the
memorable and personalized images of the memory palace were supposed to
do. It does not represent or explore the writer’s inner life; it is inwardly directed
in the sense that its layered meanings will emerge only to the writer, not the
reader. In this spatial and scattered representation of a life, memory and nar-
rative appear to have come unstitched: it is not in the continuous unreeling of
sentences that life coheres, but in a series of disconnected fragments.
But from another perspective we might read this as a stronger statement of
the continuity of human subjectivity and identity than is offered by the nar-
rative autobiography. What this configuration of the self asserts is the identity
of past and present selves, in more than one way. The eight-year-old coex-
ists with the thirty-eight year old, captured in the same glance, visible at the
same time and in the same space. If the entirety of one’s life and ages can be
viewed on a single page (or more strictly two sides of a sheet) then the person
summoned up is all those ages simultaneously. In contrast to the underlying
tension of the narrative autobiography, especially in its confessional mode—
between the I who writes and the I who is written, the self I am now and the
self I can recount only at a distance—this map of self erases those gaps and
discontinuities, and draws instead a self always present, in time and space.
How might the representation of self in this manuscript change our reading
of the longer narrative account? Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, having
described Isham’s narrative manuscript as “arguably the first text in English
that is recognisably autobiography in the modern sense: a retrospective, chron-
ological narrative that appears to describe the development of a unified self,”
and highlighted its narrative continuity and its focus on emotions and rela-
tionships, nonetheless conclude that Northampton manuscript is a reminder
of an underlying and essential otherness:
The very strangeness of this document’s way of constructing the self, as

a complex, disunified nexus of family, neighbours, reading, needlework,
national events and spiritual development, should perhaps make us wary
of searching too rigorously for the seeming coherence of modern subjec-
tivity in the more familiar narrative form of Isham’s confessions.48
This is an important qualification to any reading of Isham, in either narra-

tive. But I think we might also underline the word “seeming” in the passage
just quoted; for modern subjectivity, both experientially and in its formal
and generic articulations, is surely no less disunified, dispersed, and frag-

mentary than that represented in early modern texts. Indeed, in a period
when self-representation has perhaps never been more popular, the “conven-
tional” form of autobiographical writing today is the exception rather than
the rule; the field of autobiographical writing is dominated by accounts that
come at the self tangentially, through the stories of others, through wider
histories, through image, sound, cultural practices, rather than through a
chronologically structured narrative that proceeds in orderly fashion from
birth to present day.
Isham’s two texts, then, serve as much to complicate the idea that the form
in which the self is written makes unambiguous statements about the his-
torical and psychic constitution of that self as to underline the difference of
the early modern subject. What we see in Isham’s memory writings is both
an interiorized reflective retrospective self, constituted through human rela-
tionships and articulated through a chronological coherent narrative mem-
ory text; and a dispersed and fragmented self, constituted through relations
with the divine and through temperament, and articulated spatially and
nonchronologically. But, significantly, these are not mapped neatly onto the
two different autobiographical texts: both appear in both. Different modes
of subjectivity and different modes of articulation coexist, as they do today
in the relational and fragmented and temporally disrupted memory texts of
the last 30 years or so. In this sense they can stand for the simultaneous
familiarity and difference of the early modern self; for both the moments of
bemusement and the moments of recognition that characterize our readings
of the self-writings of this period, however we define them. Alongside the
strangeness of the world Isham inhabits, her unforgettably vivid evocation
of her childhood emotions, however peripheral to her own purposes, is also
a reminder that writing exceeds authorial intent, in ways that can be revela-
tory. The memories of childhood that for her illustrate divine purposes also
bear witness to the continuing power of memory in the making of the self,
as they both summon up lost happiness and disrupt and disturb the adult
self. And this in turn may remind us that human subjectivity has enduring
structures as well as great diversity, and that the emergence and development
of autobiographical writing offers us perspectives on both.
Notes
This chapter has been through several versions and attracted many debts on the way.
Thanks to Michelle O’Callaghan, organizer of the London Renaissance Seminar sympo-
sium on life writing in June 2008 for which the piece was first written, and to Ramona
Wray, for inviting me to Belfast the following year to give it again and for helpfully point-
ing out to me what it was actually about. Particular thanks to Erica Longfellow, codirec-
tor of the Isham Project, for her kindness in welcoming me into Isham’s world, sharing
her expertise on many topics, and especially for drawing my attention to some of the
theological and Augustinian nuances that I had missed (there are undoubtedly more);
to Elspeth Graham for characteristically insightful comments that I wish I had space to
attend to fully; and to Sally Alexander and especially Barbara Taylor for rigorous, gener-
ous, and last-minute editing.
1. E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975; Warburg
Institute Surveys VI).
2. On the ability to remember as an indication of sound mind, see Michael MacDonald,
Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981); Katharine Hodgkin, Madness in Seventeenth-Century
Autobiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
3. The two models coexist, of course. John Donne’s 1619 sermon on Ecclesiastes 12.1,
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” identifies memory as “the fac-
ulty that God desires to work upon . . . if thine understanding cannot reconcile differ-
ences in all Churches, if thy will cannot submit itself to the ordinances of thine own
Church, go to thine own memory.” Individual memory is “a pocket picture . . . a manu-
all, a bosome book,” which calls to memory instances of God’s goodness. “A Sermon of
Valediction at my going into Germany, at Lincolns-Inne, 18 April 1619,” John Donne,
Selected Prose, ed. Neil Rhodes (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 152–153. The centrality
of memory as a means to spiritual growth can be traced back to St. Augustine, for whom
this verse is key to conversion; thanks to Erica Longfellow for this point. See also her
forthcoming book Prayer and Privacy in Early Modern England, in particular the chapter
“Augustinian Selves,” on the influence of Augustine’s focus on memory in Reformed
spirituality and in women’s writing in particular; I am very grateful to Dr. Longfellow
for letting me see this unpublished chapter.
4. On Protestant memory practices and the importance of memory in seventeenth-century
spirituality and devotional writing, see Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British
Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
5. The last few decades have seen an explosion of publications on the theory and practice
of autobiographical writing. See, e.g.: Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988); John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography:
Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Laura
Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994); Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (NY:
Cornell University Press, 1999); Domna Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph: Theory and
Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987).
6. Recent overviews of early modern autobiographical writing include Ronald Bedford,
Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres,
Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Sharon Cadman Seelig,
Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michelle Dowd and Julie Eckerle, eds.,
Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
7. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin Books,
1990; first published in 1860).
8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David Wellbery,
eds., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). In the domain of literary studies influ-
ential accounts of early modern subjectivity as a transitional form include Stephen
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1980); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance
Drama (London: Methuen, 1985); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on
Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984). For studies making connections between new
forms of selfhood and new forms of self-writing, see Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self:
Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997); Henk Dragstra,
Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox, eds., Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Representation in Early
Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Michael Mascuch, Origins of the
Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1997); Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare,
Donne (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983); Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and
Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); see
also works cited in note 6.
9. Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture,” in Patricia Parker
and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
10. Among numerous responses to Greenblatt’s argument, see, e.g., Juliana Schiesari, The
Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolic of Loss in Renaissance
Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Elizabeth Jane Bellamy has published
a number of critiques; see “Psychoanalysis and the Subject in/ of/ for the Renaissance,”
in Jonathan V. Crewe, ed., Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992); and most recently, “Psychoanalysis
and Early Modern Culture: Is It Time to Move beyond Charges of Anachronism?,”
Literature Compass 7/5 (2010), 318–331.
11. In addition to works by Greenblatt, Barker, and Belsey cited in note 7, see, e.g., Jonathan
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Works of Shakespeare and his
Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984).
12. It should be noted that medievalists have been (justly) critical of new historicist gener-
alizations about the medieval self; for the classic statement of this, see David Aers, “A
Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists, or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the
‘History of the Subject,’” in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350–1600 (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 177–202.
13. The influence of Michel Foucault’s work, with its attention to power relations at the
micro as well as the macro level, its distaste for ideas of psychic depth, its empha-
sis on language and the body, and its identification of the early modern period as a
key point of transformation is a significant underpinning to many of these debates,
although this is not the place to explore it. Particularly influential for Renaissance stud-
ies were the grand “survey” works: The History of Sexuality Vol 1: The Will to Knowledge
(London: Penguin, 1977, first published 1976); The History of Madness, trans. J. Khalfa
and J. Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006, first published 1961; this was available for
many years only in the abridged 1964 translation); and The Order of Things (London:
Pantheon, 1970; first published 1966).
14. See Katharine Eisaman Maus’s influential Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. the discussion of inwardness and new
historicism on pp. 26–31. For an early exploration of the vocabulary of subjectivity, see
Ferry, The “Inward” Language.
15. Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1977) influentially portrayed the early modern family as strictly patriarchal
and emotionally detached, characterized by arranged marriages and distant parents. For
a helpful account of developments in the history of the early modern family since the
publication of Stone’s book, see the editors’ introduction in Helen Berry and Elizabeth
Foyster, eds., The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
16. Literary and historical studies intersect to some extent here, with literature gener-
ally more open to psychoanalysis. On witchcraft, see above all Lyndal Roper’s work,
most notably her early study Oedipus and the Devil Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion
in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); and for a survey of the topic,
Katharine Hodgkin, “Gender, Mind and Body: Feminism and Psychoanalysis,” in
Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, eds., Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 182–202. On melancholy, see Schiesari,
Gendering of Melancholia. On dreams, see Peter Brown, ed., Reading Dreams: The
Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999); and K. Hodgkin, M. O’Callaghan, and S. Wiseman, eds., Reading the Early Modern
Dream: The Terrors of the Night (London: Routledge, 2008). See also Carla Mazzio and
Douglas Trevor, eds., Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (London:
Routledge, 2000), which offers a series of thoughtful and critical examinations of the
intersections of its terms, and the more explicitly psychoanalytic collection, Timothy
Murray and Alan K. Smith, eds., Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early
Modern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
17. See, e.g., Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” in Helen Wilcox, ed.,
Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Sorcery and Subjectivity in Early Modern Discourses
of Witchcraft,” in Mazzio and Trevor, Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern
Culture.
18. Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing, 1.
19. Gregory S. Brown, “Am ‘I’ a ‘Post-Revolutionary Self’? Historiography of the Self in the
Age of Enlightenment and Revolution,” History and Theory 47 (May 2008), 240. A sig-
nificant figure here is Michael Mascuch, whose contentious Origins of the Individualist Self
attempted to redefine and tighten up the territory of autobiography in order to argue that
true autobiography, and thus true individualism, does not arrive until the eighteenth
century; although the approaches noted here are inclusive rather than exclusive, the
underlying premise about the determining position of genre is in certain ways shared.
20. “One doesn’t need to be Hamlet,” asserts Smyth, “to have a self, to have subjectivity, to
be an individual, to have a life to tell”; Smyth, Autobiography, 158.
21. “What would it mean,” asks Jeffrey Masten, “to imagine this commonplace book
and its commonplaces as structuring for its writer . . . a psychic life literally of another
order . . . ?” See Masten, “The Interpretation of Dreams, circa 1610,” in Mazzio and Trevor,
Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture, 162. See also Smyth, Autobiography,
chapter 3, “Commonplace Book Lives”: “Commonplace books can shed some light on
alternative early modern conceptions of subjectivity . . . Commonplace books suggest a
subjectivity that proceeds through a searching out of analogues, which prizes same-
ness, not difference,” 156.
22. In addition to works on autobiographical writing cited in note 6, for spiritual auto-
biography specifically, see: D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative:
Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative:
The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of
Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen:
Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996).
23. Jane Turner, Choice Experiences of the Kind Dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion . . .
(London: 1653), 194.
24. See Patrick Collinson, “‘A Magazine of Religious Patterns’: An Erasmian Topic Transposed
in English Puritanism,” in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism
(London: Hambledon Press, 1983); Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in
Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); Tessa Watt,
Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
25. Thomas Whythorne, The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, James Osborne, ed.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962). The question of the “first” autobiography is
inevitably contentious. The early fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, a third-person
dictated narrative, is often cited as the earliest English autobiography, and see Douglas
Gray, “Finding Identity in the Middle Ages,” in A. J. Piesse, ed., Sixteenth-Century Identities
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 9–33 for discussion of various exam-
ples of the autobiographical voice in medieval writing. However Whythorne’s first-person
extended chronological narrative does represent a shift from these earlier modes.
26. The artisan Nehemiah Wallington is an exception; see Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World:
A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985); David Booy,
ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection (Aldershot: Ashgate,

2007).
27. For further examples of manuscript autobiographies of this kind, see K. Hodgkin, ed.,
Women, Madness and Sin: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2010); Experiences in the Life of Mary Penington, Written by Herself, with introduc-
tion and notes by Norman Penney (London: Friends Historical Society 1992); Suzanne
Trill, ed., Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
28. Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Porter, Rewriting
the Self, 21.
29. Elizabeth Isham was the subject of a major research project funded by the British
Academy and directed by Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, based at the Warwick
Centre for Renaissance Studies. The project website “Constructing Elizabeth Isham”
(http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/isham/) contains transcripts of her
autobiographical writings, as well as a considerable amount of useful information and
analysis of the texts, and extensive discussion of the various papers left by Isham and
the relations between them. I am extremely grateful to the project directors for making
early versions of the transcripts available to me before they were put up. On the fam-
ily writing culture, see Erica Longfellow’s paper on this site, “‘Take unto you words’:
Gender, Family Writing Culture and Elizabeth Isham’s Life-Writing,” revised and pub-
lished (as “‘Take unto ye words’: Elizabeth Isham’s Booke of Remembrance and Puritan
Cultural Forms”) in E. Scott-Baumann and J. Harris, eds., The Intellectual Culture of
Puritan Women, 1558–1680 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 122–134.
30. Isham’s two main autobiographical texts are the “Booke of Rememberance,” Princeton
University Library, Robert Taylor Collection MS RTC01 no. 62, and a page of untitled
memory notes, Northamptonshire Record Office MS IL 3365. For a detailed account of
the latter, see Jill Millman, “The Other Life of Elizabeth Isham,” on the Isham website.
References to these two MSS, taken from the transcripts on the Isham website, are in the
text, by folio number for the Princeton MS and by year for the Northamptonshire MS.
31. Memory, more specifically rote learning, was a central element in early modern edu-
cational theory and practice. The literary and humanist as well as religious culture of
the Isham family evidently valued such an education for girls as well as boys, although
there are also obvious gender differences in their learning—Elizabeth, unlike the highly
educated daughters of sixteenth-century elite humanist families, did not learn Latin.
See Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow’s introduction to the online transcripts of
the Isham MSS, “Examine My Life: Writing the Self in the Early Seventeenth Century,”
for discussion of Isham’s education.
32. The reference is to the forgetting of Jerusalem, Ps. 137.5. Isham’s emphasis on the need
to remember God is also Augustinian; for Augustine God is always present in the mem-
ory and to forget God is to forget what one is, or what it is to be human. The pervasive
influence of Augustine on Isham’s writing is discussed by Alice Eardley, “‘som other
nots”: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’
(c.1639),” in Phillipa Hardman and Anne Lawrence-Mathers, eds., Women and Writing
c. 1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press,
2010), 177–195. Many thanks to Erica Longfellow for the point and the reference.
33. For examples of episodes in childhood recorded because they foretell future events, see
Arise Evans, An Eccho to the Voice from heaven, or a Narration of the speciall Calling, and
Visions of Arise Evans . . . (London 1652); John Rogers, Ohel, or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle
for the Sun (London 1653). For descriptions of an early love of solitude and dislike of play,
see Richard Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie. Divided into Five Books (London
1642); Elizabeth Stirredge, Strength in Weakness Manifest: in the Life, Various Trials, and
Christian Testimony of that faithful Servant and Handmaid of the Lord . . . (London 1711).
34. On Isham’s extensive practice in herbal medicine in response to domestic sicknesses,
see the note by Michelle DiMeo and Rebecca Laroche, “Elizabeth Isham and Medicine,”
on the Isham website, which includes a useful glossary of illness terms.
35. Suffering as a spur to autobiographical writing is discussed by Elspeth Graham,
“Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad: The Suffering of the Self in Autobiographical
Tradition,” in Dragstra et al. ed., Betraying Our Selves. However, the spiritual value
assigned to suffering also needs to be taken into account here; our assumption that
wellness is the natural and proper state of affairs is open to further reflection. My
thanks to Elspeth Graham for this thought (private communication).
36. Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003), 10.
37. [Richard Allestree], The Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar way . . . (London:
J. G. and F. Rivington, 1832; first published 1658), 231.
38. Isham is not alone in her critical view of parents in a passion; the importance of not
beating one’s children in anger is a recurrent theme in this period. Allestree, e.g., is
in favor of “correction,” but insists that if given in a rage it will not only risk becom-
ing “immoderate,” but also lose its effect: “the child . . . will think he is corrected not
because he has done a fault, but because his parent is angry; and so will rather blame
the parent than himself”; Whole Duty of Man, 226.
39. Elizabeth’s own take on this is interestingly sceptical: “these conjectures are uncertaine
for I have knowne those borne on the same day which have bene of con-trary dispoti-
tions,” she comments (18r).
40. The immediate issue here was over charitable donations; the suggestion is that Judith
Isham was either kept short of money, or was inclined to extravagance in her gifts to the
poor. Elizabeth’s anxiety to protect the reputations of both mother and father is appar-
ent; on the one hand she defends her mother’s charity even though it may have left
her daughters less well off (“it doth rejoyce my hart farr more to thinke that her workes
follow her: then if she had lefte all she had to my selfe”); on the other hand she refutes
suggestions that her father might have been unkind to his wife, especially in financial
terms: “I neede no better testimony of my fathers kindness to her then what I find by
her owne writtings acknowledging it the lords great mercie in moving her husbands
heart; that he had such care, and provided such meanes for her health; (for he spared
no cost for her),” she insists (11v).
41. For an interesting discussion of heredity in relation to ideas of likeness and difference
in a literary context, see Marianne Novy, “Adopted Children and Constructions of
Heredity, Nurture and Parenthood in Shakespeare’s Romances,” in Andrea Immel and
Michael Witmore, eds., Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800
(London: Routledge, 2006), 55–74.
42. Timothy Rogers, A Discourse Concerning Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholly
(London 1691), xix.
43. An early example is Sir Thomas Elyot’s instructions on how to educate elite young
men, The Boke Named the Governour, first published in 1531 (London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, Everyman Library, 1962). On childhood in general, see Linda Pollock, Forgotten
Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500
(London: Longman, 1995).
44. Margaret Ezell, “Elizabeth Isham’s Books of Remembrance and Forgetting,” at http://
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/isham/workshop/ezell/, esp paras 8–10.
45. The translation Isham used was a recent one by William Watts, Saint Augustines
Confessions Translated (London: John Norton for John Partridge, 1631). Many thanks
to Erica Longfellow for the reference and for highlighting the importance of the word
“lickorishnesse”; for further discussion of this passage, see Clarke and Longfellow,
“Examine My Life.”
46. Ezell, “Elizabeth Isham’s Books of Remembrance and Forgetting,” para 24.
47. The classic study of the memory palace is Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). See also the preface to Raphael Samuel, Theatres of
Memory vol 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994).
48. Clarke and Longfellow, “Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiographical Writings.”
13
Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic
Imaginary
Alex Potts
This chapter examines the ways in which ideas of the unconscious informed
critical discussion of the new forms of abstract painting that emerged in
the years immediately after World War II, variously designated Abstract
Expressionist in America and art informel in Europe. Most dramatically rep-
resented by the drip paintings produced by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s
and early 1950s,1 this was work in which the free-form mark making seemed
unconstrained either by the demands of depiction—it offered few recogniz-
able motifs let alone naturalistically rendered representations—or by the
compositional logic of geometric abstraction. Little in the way of conscious
integration or form creation was apparent in its affectively charged pictorial
world of accumulated marks and splashes and fluidly undulating lines.
What concerns me here are critical discussions of this painting that spec-
ulated on the impulses shaping it and its broader resonances. Among the
most illuminating were several informed by postwar psychoanalytic theory,
most notably the object relations theory that played a key role in the United
Kingdom. Writing by figures such as Anton Ehrenzweig and Adrian Stokes on
the part played by the unconscious in this art is worth considering in depth
because it moved beyond conventional psychoanalytic interpretation of a
work of art as simply expressing or illustrating psychic phenomena. Instead
of seeking out motifs that could be seen to represent or picture an inner psy-
chic reality, they envisaged the curiously compelling configurations of paint
as themselves playing out basic, psychically charged interactions between
inner self and outer world.
The ideas of the unconscious invoked by both artists and critics operated at
several levels, not just that of the psychic. To see painting as shaped by forces
lying beyond conscious or rational control involved taking account not only
of processes going on inside the mind, but also of equally uncontrollable ones
265
266 Alex Potts
operating in the outside world, whether this be the first-order material world
of physical and natural phenomena, or the equally material one of the social,
economic, and cultural. While any broader understanding of the uncon-
scious will have outer material as well as inner psychic dimensions, this is
particularly the case with painting, a phenomenon so evidently located on a
borderline between external things and inner psychic impulses and projec-
tions. A painting is both a physical entity and a process of apprehending,
imagining, and projecting things.
The painting being considered here makes this condition unusually evi-
dent because the absence of clearly defined motifs means that it cannot
be seen in the way more conventional representational painting and even
abstract painting often is, that is, as a window opening out onto an imagined
or depicted world. It obliges the viewer to take note of the facticity of the
paint work and focus on the processes shaping it. The freely fashioned mark
making invites a response that relates these marks to the less than fully con-
scious gestures and impulses of the painter who made it and to the literally
unconscious, material behavior of paint as it is dripped or spread on a canvas.
My main focus will be on the work of Jackson Pollock (figure 13.1) and the
critical responses it prompted. At the same time, I shall consider the work
of another important artist of the period, the French painter Jean Dubuffet
(figure 13.2). His painting and his very articulate writing about it2 suggest
a rather different interplay between an inner psychic reality and an outer
one of material substances and things that brings into focus the distinctive
ideological resonances of Pollock’s painterly project and the understandings
of the unconscious associated with it. In Dubuffet’s work, something largely
absent in Pollock’s is evoked, a sense of the materiality of the social environ-
ment and the eruptions of unconscious impulse and desire animating it.
* * *
One reason that Pollock’s painting became such a focus of interest for crit-
ics in the 1940s and 1950s was his unusual way of applying paint to canvas,
dramatized in photos and even in a film of him, dipping a stick or a brush
into cans of liquid paint and then dripping the paint onto an unprimed
canvas laid out on the ground with rhythmic movements of his arms. This
process could easily seem to have a very immediate—and therefore possibly
unconscious—gestural quality, less controlled and calculated than conven-
tional application of paint to a canvas on an easel. The paint work itself is
unusually material and physical—the substance of the liquid paint and the
effects created by dripping and splashing are more in evidence than in con-
ventional painting. That the painting consists of a layered web of lines rather
than of fields of color or of bounded shapes is also important.3 The fluid
marks created by the dripped paint put one in mind of the drawing processes
through which motifs are delineated in visual art, even as they stop short of
defining these. Depiction seems to inhere in the materiality of the paint work
at some level while also being blocked and negated. There is an unsettling
Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary 267
but also intriguing suggestion of a never-ending forming and dissolving of

motifs and images.4 Because representational shapes are both implied and
held in suspense or obliterated, Pollocks’s works were often interpreted by its
early critics in less strictly formal terms than other abstract paintings that
were more readily seen as a studies in pure form or color. A passage from an
essay on Pollock by the critic Sam Hunter written in 1956 conjures up par-
ticularly well how such instability and ambiguity were played out in people’s
responses to his work: “His most resolutely non-objective manner always car-
ried with it a halo of vague ideas and near-images, and intermittently uncov-
ered in its depths some residual ties to natural reality.”5 A few years earlier,
in a review of an exhibition of Pollock’s work in New York in 1948, the same
critic came up with one of the more perspicacious attempts to make sense of
this work whose suggestiveness and power somehow seemed to be lodged in
its material fabric:
It would seem that the main intention of these curiously webbed linear
variations—in clamant streaks and rays of aluminium and resonant blacks
and grays for the most part—is a deliberate assault on our image-making
faculty. At every point of concentration of these high-tension moments of
bravura phrasing (which visually are like agitated coils of barbed wire) there
is a disappointing absence of resolution in an image or pictorial incident
for all their magical diffusion of power. And then, wonder of wonders, by a
curious reversal which seems a natural paradox in art, the individual can-
vases assume a whole image-making activity and singleness of aspect.6
What kind of world or image seemed to emerge from the teeming sprawl and
overlaying of painterly drips? It is tempting in seeking to answer this to turn to
the more representational work Pollock produced subsequently, in which the
image-making potential of his freely generated marks became quite evident,
as in the late work dating from 1953, Portrait and a Dream (Figure 13.1).7
Figure 13.1 Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream (1953), oil on canvas, 149 × 342 cm,
Dallas Museum of Art.
268 Alex Potts
Here it seems as if a more conventional Surrealist projection of inner psychic

drama is being played out. A figure, presumably female, just about emerges
from the web of lines and splashes of paint in the left half of the work, its
darkened head on the upper right of this section of the canvas and splayed
legs toward the lower left. Portrait and a Dream not only contains figurative
forms—namely, the portrait head on the right, and the more ambiguous free
form female figure emerging from the web of lines on the left. The work
as a whole can be viewed in relatively conventional representational terms
as picturing the outside of the head and the dreams or phantasies erupting
inside it. This interplay between palpable exteriority and psychic interiority
indicates a further affinity with Surrealist art, though with the important
qualification that the insistent materiality of the dynamic web of paint work
in the area on the left suggests a blurring of the boundaries between the inner
and the outer, as if the pulse and flow of the workings of the psyche had its
own substance that was in some way equivalent to the fabric of the paint
work. If Pollock’s more radically abstract works were to be viewed from such
a perspective, this blurring would seem to be almost complete, with there
being no way of distinguishing between what related to inner promptings
and what to the outer substance of things.
Pollock made only a very few public statements about his art but in those
that he did, the idea of the unconscious played a central role. In an interview
conducted in 1950, when faced with the question “Would it be true to say
that the artist is painting from the unconscious,” he replied: “The uncon-
scious is a very important side of modern art and I think the unconscious
drives do mean a lot in looking at paintings.” Asked why modern artists
no longer represented objects from the world they inhabited as traditional
artists had done, he added: “The modern artist, it seems to me, is working
and expressing an inner world—in other words—expressing the energy the
motion and other inner forces.”8 In these responses he was not simply echo-
ing fashionable Freudian and Jungian ideas circulating in cultural circles at
the time. He had been in intensive analysis and had gone so far as to produce
a series of drawings as part of the treatment he underwent in 1939–40 with a
Jungian analyst.9 These drawings are conceived in classically Jungian terms
as delineations of archetypical images circulating in the unconscious, carry-
ing symbolic and mythic resonances similar to many of the semifigurative
paintings he produced in the early 1940s.10
In a later interview conducted in 1956, after he had begun experimenting
with a semifigurative way of working once again, Pollock offered a rather less
coherent commentary on the question of the unconscious. From this confu-
sion, however, there emerges a more suggestive sense of the tensions between
representation and radical abstraction in his work and of how something
unconscious might emerge in the materiality of his painterly process:
I don’t care for “abstract expressionism” . . . and it’s certainly not “nonob-
jective” and not “nonrepresentational” either. I’m very representational
some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out
of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We’re all of us influ-

enced by Freud, I guess. I’ve been Jungian for a long time . . . painting is a
state of being . . . 11
Pollock’s commentary about the driving force of an inner unconscious needs

to be set in the context of other statements he made about how his art was
also responding to outer realities. The distinctive approach to painting that
he and his contemporaries had developed was in his words “a natural growth
out of a need, and from the need the modern artist has found new ways
of expressing the world about him.” Where he gave titles to his drip and
his more abstract semifigurative paintings (most of the former were simply
numbered), these rarely referenced inner states of mind—one notable excep-
tion being The Blue Unconscious—but instead were either expressive in a fairly
conventional symbolic way— Gothic or Lucifer— or were evocative of material
or cosmic phenomena in the outer world— Phosphorescence, Watery Paths, Sea
Change, Comet, Shooting Star, Galaxy, and Reflections of the Big Dipper. Absent
are references to what one might call the social realm—as if the imaginary
conjured up in his paintings oscillated between an inner world of uncon-
scious drives and impulses and an outer world of distant cosmic forces, and
bracketed out the realm of human social interaction, even of the very basic
kind that preoccupied object-relations theorists. The cosmic connotations of
the web of intermingling, seemingly fluid forms in his work seems to have
had a particular appeal for critics—and they were more than ready to run
with the prompts given by his titles. Here is one such critic, Park Tyler, writ-
ing in 1950: “Pollock’s paint flies through space like the elongating bodies of
comets and, striking the blind alley of the flat canvas, bursts into frozen vis-
ibilities. What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless
non-being of the universe?”12 The title of Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, a work
dating from 1947,13 one of his earliest fully abstract drip paintings, evokes a
world alive with phantasmic projections and vividly material things.14 In the
passage from Shakespeare’s Tempest that the title cites, Ariel is alarming the
distraught shipwrecked Ferdinand by conjuring up a dream-like vision of his
drowned father’s dead body rotting under the sea:
Full fathom five thy father lies

Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
Critics at the time and Pollock himself were compelled to envision the com-
plex swirl of painterly effect as evoking a world of some kind, as hovering on
the edge of condensing into a recognizable picturing while never quite doing
so—with the paint work somehow merging into suggestions of cosmic forces
or of the pulse and flow of inner psychic process. For a viewer not familiar
270 Alex Potts
with this kind of work, the effect it had of blocking expectations of seeing
something in a painting, either an identifiable image or a purely abstract
play of line and form and color, created a hiatus. In the indeterminate space
that then opened up a densely configured blur of psychic and physical phe-
nomena suggested itself, a little like the intermingling of dream images and
images of an underwater world in the passage from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
* * *
This way of conceiving painting as both material and psychic phenomenon

brought into play priorities that were central to postwar phenomenologi-
cal and psychoanalytic thinking. Such thinking directed attention to the
embeddedness of a supposedly immaterial human consciousness in the
materiality of the body and the material substance and fabric of the world
around it. Such a turn of thought is very evident, not only in the existential
and phenomenological writing of postwar French intellectuals such as Sartre
and Merlea-Ponty,15 but also in the theorizing about art and culture associ-
ated with the object relations school of psychoanalytic thinking that came to
prominence in Britain in the period.16 With the latter, there is a broad shift
from a focus on the inner formation of the psyche in its trajectory through
the sexual traumas of the oedipal phase, to a concern with the formative
effects of psychically charged interactions between inner self and outer world
played out between child and mother in earliest infancy. Object relations
theory informed a body of very influential critical writing on art, most nota-
bly that by the art educationalist Anton Ehrenzweig, author of The Hidden
Order of Art. A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (1967) and by the
art theorist Adrian Stokes, whose postwar speculation on the aesthetics of
the visual arts was strongly informed by his experience undergoing intensive
analysis with Melanie Klein.17 Both these writers were prompted to speculate
on the psychic dynamic that was set in play by the new kind of informal
abstract painting represented by Pollock’s work.
Before considering the commentary of these theorists, it is worth turning
briefly to the fascinating psychoanalytic exploration of the ways in which
processes of painting enact an interplay between inner and outer worlds in
the book On Not Being Able to Paint (1950) by Marion Milner.18 Milner was an
amateur painter, and in this study recorded her experiences as she sought to
render through drawing an inwardly felt sense of something she had either
imagined or observed. What preoccupied her was her failure to achieve a cor-
respondence between feeling and images projected in the mind and external-
ized markings on the paper—a failure that she found the more acute the more
she tried to achieve an exact rendering of what had prompted her to embark
on a drawing in the first place. Ideally, in her view, the process of drawing or
painting should exemplify those “moments in which one does not have to
decide which is oneself and which is the other—moments of illusion, but illu-
sions that are perhaps the essential root of high morale and vital enthusiasm
for living.”19 Her critique of conventional processes of depiction—carefully
observing something and then seeking to render it exactly—as getting in
the way of such symbiosis between self and other, rather than enhancing it,
echoed a widespread attitude among modern artists at the time who were
experimenting with alternatives to traditional figuration, whether in a radi-
cally abstract or semirepresentational mode.20 Like such artists, Milner was
of the view that a compelling interplay between inner and outer worlds only
became possible at those moments when the artist immersed him or herself
in processes of mark making or painting without consciously directing these
to the goal of depicting anything. The motif rendered in the drawing needed
to emerge unconsciously as it were, independently of any exercise of will on
the part of the artist, though it would also need to be worked up and shaped
if it was to achieve a stable resonance.21
What was at stake in this analysis for Milner was not just gaining insight
into processes of art making. There were larger ethical issues involved that
had to do with psychoanalytic understandings of the effects of psychically
charged, very basic processes of interaction between self and other and self
and world. The activity of painting and drawing was for her one significant
instance of striving to achieve a symbiosis between the two, which grew out
of but could also detach itself from the unstable dynamic of primary psychic
processes.22 As she put it, “[T]he material the artist in us is trying to create is
basically the raw stuff of human impulse . . . it is perhaps ourselves that the
artist is trying to create; and if ourselves, then also the world, because one’s
view of the one is interpenetrated with one’s view of the other.”23
Anton Ehrenzweig in his book The Hidden Order of Art. A Study in the
Psychology of Artistic Imagination was attempting something similar, but he
engaged much more explicitly with new developments taking place in the
art of the time. The book, though only published in 1967, shortly after his
death, grew out of ideas he had developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s
on the part played by the unconscious in processes of making and view-
ing paintings.24 His broader argument had to do with the central role that
an unconscious, dedifferentiated engagement with the world, an unfocused
looking quite distinct from any rational striving to make sense of what one
saw, was central not just to artistic viewing, but to any process of perception.
In his view, our perceptual engagement with the world was grounded in an
unconscious substructure of awareness in which “outer perception and inner
fantasy become indistinguishable”—and without which conscious vision
would “lose all sense of plastic reality; it would go flat and dead, unable to
stimulate our rational orientation and activity.”25 Like Milner, he was striv-
ing for a psychoanalytic understanding of the interplay between a fusing of
inner psychic life and outer world, or what he called dedifferentiation, and a
conscious take on things as having a reality separate from the self, character-
ized by him as differentiation.
Both were drawing on Melanie Klein’s characterization of the infant’s ear-
liest interaction with the world around it as moving through two phases or
positions. There was the more primary paranoid-schizoid phase in which no
distinction was made between the inner promptings of psychic drives and the
impact made by external phenomena, and when a sense of the outer world
and of the self were caught up in an unstable psychic drama of projection
272 Alex Potts
and introjection, of desire and frustration and aggression. There was then a
second depressive phase in which the inner self and outer world began to be
distinguished. This she called depressive because it brought with it an aware-
ness that there existed external phenomena impinging on the inner life of
the psyche that were alien to it and independent of its desires—possessing a
substantive reality quite apart from being either good objects that satisfied
inner wants or bad ones that frustrated these.26
Ehrenzweig situated his moment of dedifferentiation between the
paranoid-schizoid and the depressive phases: conscious objectification had
not yet asserted itself but there was not a complete surrender to immedi-
ate unconscious impulse either. Regardless of one’s assessment of the viabil-
ity of his model as a broader theorizing of processes of perception, it offers
a suggestive way of thinking about those forms of modern painting that
presented themselves as if situated on an interface between the enveloping
effects of inner unconscious promptings and a conscious sense of things as
entities out there in the external world.27 It also relates in intriguing ways to
Pollock’s musing about painting as “an easy give and take” between inter-
nally generated gesture and outer traces of paint work and about being “in
my painting . . . not aware of what I’m doing” while at the same time creating
something that has a “compelling life of its own” and coheres in some kind
of image.28
The informal, radically abstract painting of artists such as Pollock provided
Ehrenzweig with a striking instance of his characterization of modern art
as giving priority to a dedifferentiated mode of viewing in which a latent
sense of hidden or indecipherable order emerged from an apparent chaos
of markings. As he put it, the “arrival of American action painting bore out
my tentative diagnosis in the most spectacular manner. Jackson Pollock
blew up the microscopic network of scribbles of which ordinary texture and
handwriting consist. The enormous loops and driplets dazzled the eye . . . a
new abstract pictorial space became fully revealed.”29 Yet he was still some-
what uneasy about what he saw as the attenuating of the recuperative and
more conscious depressive phase, and the privileging of a “manic feeling of
oneness” and “envelopment.”30 While perception in general, and thus any
viewing of painting, swung between the two poles of “differentiation” and
“dedifferentiation,” “now focusing on single gestalt patterns, now blotting
out all conscious awareness in order to take in the undivided whole,” in the
kind of modern art represented by Pollock, the
ego rhythm is somewhat onesided. The surface gestalt lies in ruins, splin-
tered and unfocusable, the differentiated matrix of all art lies exposed, and
forces the spectator to remain in the oceanic state of the empty stare where
all differentiation is suspended. The pictorial space advances and engulfs
him in a multi-dimensional unity where inside and outside merge.31
Ehrenzweig insisted that it would be misleading to see the viewer’s experi-

ence of such painting as “pathological,” and emphatically distanced himself
from simplistic critique of the new American action painting as sympto-

matic of mindless surrender to unconscious impulse—“the elusive pictorial
space is a conscious signal of an unconscious coherence and integration
which redeems the fragmentation of surface gestalt.”32 But in addition to a
vague unease about an art that seemed to effect an “almost total disruption
of conscious composition” without counterbalancing effects of recuperative
or stabilizing integration, he felt that such work ran the risk of soon losing
the powerful unconscious resonance it had when first deployed. Once its
procedures became familiar, “the inevitable defensive reaction of the sec-
ondary process set in,” and a form of painting that previously had exposed
the viewer to the engulfing and potentially discomfiting effects of primary
process became little more than a “very deliberate exercise in decorative
textures.”33
In Stokes’s writing on modern painting in a series of essays dating from the
early and mid-1960s, the unease that emerges in Ehrenzweig is articulated
more insistently and also given a cultural, political, and ethical cast. The psy-
choanalytic model Stokes deployed was very close to Ehrenzweig’s and simi-
larly derived from Melanie Klein’s conception of the paranoid schizoid and
depressive positions. According to Stokes, the paranoid-schizoid “envelop-
ment factor,” or “compelling invitation to identify,” grounded the painter’s
and the viewer’s engagement with a work of art. At this juncture, the dis-
tinction between the inner and outer was momentarily suspended, and the
work was effectively absorbed within the self’s primary psychic processes of
projection and introjection. In the second depressive phase of engagement,
this part-object relation gave way to one in which the work became a “whole
and separate reconstituted object.”34 With Stokes, as with Marion Milner, an
ethics of self-other interaction was at stake in the shift between incantatory
envelopment, which effectively destroyed or dispersed the outside object’s
autonomy, and a contrasting “reparation” of it as a whole object.35
Stokes’s theory acquired a social and cultural dimension as a result of his
interest in exploring how a sense of self was in part constituted by affectively
charged interactions with its immediate physical surroundings. The interplay
between self and other activated when making or apprehending a painting he
saw as mirroring psychic interactions taking place between the self and the
larger physical environment it inhabited, an environment in part social in that
it was shaped by man-made buildings and manufactured things. The painter,
when seeking out configurations he or she found particularly compelling, would
light on those that in some way echoed the constitution of his or her inner
world; while the latter in turn would be shaped by his or her broader responses
to a largely made-made outer world. In this way, according to Stokes,
visual art seeks to reflect and embody some of the needs or tensions of a
society, and of the artist’s inner world, vis-à-vis nature, in terms of the out-
side world. The painter is he whose inner world, everywhere intertwined
with the outer, will be projected in such a way as to communicate to his
fellows a freshness of feeling about objects.36
274 Alex Potts
This “feeling about objects” had a lot to do with feelings about the environ-
ment that a society, for the most part unconsciously, created for itself.
The unease and fascination much modern painting provoked were closely
related, in Stokes’s view, to the affectively charged responses produced by the
physical environments of modern industrial society: the “enveloping rela-
tionship prompted by the work of art vis-à-vis its creator and spectator has
had, as a forerunner and antithesis, confusing and hostile projective identifi-
cations with anti-aesthetic man—made things.”37 The “hallucinatory” qual-
ity he detected in contemporary art could in his view be attributed to the
way that
the mechanical apparatus that surrounds and supports our modern living,
instead of stimulating a preponderant sense of otherness in the light of
an unparalleled organization of outer substances, tends rather to suggest
abrupt experiences, that are both stranger than this and nearer to us . . . the
beauty in our streets is mostly the one of glitter, of flashing lights; surpris-
ingly, momentary signals of a confusing ramification within, yet we are
arrested by a sense neither of depth nor surface.38
For Stokes, the work of Pollock and his American contemporaries, which
began to have a major impact in Britain in the late 1950s,39 offered a particu-
larly dramatic instance of a larger tendency he had detected in modern art:
“[T]he palpable textures of modern painting express the division and disinte-
gration of culture as well as the ambivalent artist’s restitution, often carried
no further than an assembly of scaffolding.” The recuperative dynamic of
artistic creation was barely registered, to the point that the process of symbol
formation found in most art was absent. It was as if there was an “attempt in
modern art to break down the accepted image in favour of primitive entities
that it symbolizes.”40 Pollock’s art in particular—which he saw as “undoubt-
edly excellent”—took this further than most. It represented for him an art
of extreme projective identification in which in the inner life of the psyche
and the outer formation of the paint work seemed to blur into one another
and block any conscious fashioning of symbolic forms—he was struck by
Pollock’s comment about being in his painting.41
While in Stokes’s view
unspoken experiences, bodily and mental, have always been incorporated

in art through the appeal of formal relationships . . . when, as now, they are
offered without the accompaniment of any other symbolic content . . . they
suggest the unlimited, a concept always present to the mind in terms of a
boundless, traumatic bad or a boundless, bountiful good, by which we suf-
fer envelopment or from which we would perpetually feed.42
With symbols being central to social interchange, such art was, in his diag-
nosis, one in which substantive social and cultural formations were largely
dissolved, generating phantasies of an inner self existing in direct symbiosis
with a limitless unpeopled world or cosmos. As a result, while the great gen-
erality” of which Abstract Expressionism was capable “can approach an effect
of cosmic contemplation,” it at the same time “often expresses an affiliation
with the settlement of a nerveless trance.”43
* * *
In Dubuffet’s work there is, as in Pollock’s, a preponderance of freely generated

painterly mark making and a tendency to dispersal that blocks one from see-
ing his scenarios as integrated wholes. In his landscape or cityscape like works
(Figure 13.2), recognizable forms do gain definition here and there, but these
are elements in an anarchic array of substances and fragments of things. They
evoke everyday earthbound environments, and the interactions between the
figure-like elements and the world in which they are embedded are social as
much as they are purely physical. This is painting that suggests a close affinity
between inner and outer worlds, not just because the immediacy and informal-
ity of the laying on of paint and marking of lines is suggestive of a free inter-
play between impulsive subjective gesture and objective shaping of the artistic
materials. The basic underlay of textured paint work sets up an equivalence
between the material make up of the things and environments represented and
that of the figures immersed in them. This is not quite how one would imagine
Stokes would like to envisage a more socialized and symbolically grounded
interplay between inner and outer worlds—lacking as it does any suggestions
Figure 13.2 Jean Dubuffet, Rue Pifre (1961), from the serius of paintings Paris Circus,
oil on canvas, 165 × 220 cm, private collection.
276 Alex Potts
of restitutive integration. But neither is there in Dubuffet’s art that sense of

psychic or cosmic oneness one sometimes finds in Pollock’s work.
For one thing, Dubuffet’s work has more of a vernacular quality than
Pollock’s, mostly because of the everyday nature of the scenarios represented.
There is also a greater sense of base materiality in the very substance of
paint work, with its earthy and somewhat discordant colorations, an effect
enhanced by Dubuffet’s experimentation with thick and pasty grounds.44 He
rarely engaged in conventional painting with a painter’s brush, but instead
textured and shaped his work by smearing and scraping and incising and
sometimes dripping the variously fluid and thickened media he used, in ways
that make Pollock’s dripping seem almost elegant.45
Dubuffet made a point of emphasizing his commitment to material proc-
esses of painting, talking about how these gave rise to effects, often unin-
tended consequences of the behavior of the materials he was using, that
seemed actively to block giving shape to the represented object he had in
mind—and yet somehow as a result made the “presence” of the object “more
surprising, more impressive.”46 The compelling evocation of an object he
believed, rather like Milner, was best achieved by adopting procedures that
opened themselves up to accident and ran counter to the controlling logic of
conscious depiction:
This brutal manifestation, in the picture, of the material means employed

by the painter to conjure up the objects being represented, and which
seem to prevent them . . . from taking shape, function in reality for me in
the opposite way; on the contrary, to me it seems, paradoxically, to give
these objects a heightened presence, or rather, to put it better, to render
this presence more surprising, more impressive.47
Dubuffet characterized the activity of painting as appealing to a very basic,

everyday, and deeply tactile messing around with paint and feeling immersed
in its fluid yet resistant materiality that the viewer was invited to reenact:
He scratches where the painter scratched, rubs, gouges, masticates, applies

pressure there where the painter did so . . . where the paint ran he feels the
movement of the viscous fall of the paste dragged down by it own weight;
where explosions have taken place, he explodes with them. Where the
surface has creased while drying, he dries up too, contracts and creases up
himself where a lump has been formed . . . 48
What Dubuffet has in mind here is not just a process of engaging with the
materiality of paint, but also a more general interpenetration of mind and
matter. In his conception of art making, the operations of the mind, its flows
and accretions and interruptions, directly echo physical processes occurring
in the material world: “the movements of the mind, if one undertakes to give
them body by means of painting—have something in common—are close
relatives perhaps—with physical concretions of all sorts.”49
The suggestive conflation of painterly formations with psychic processes

going on in the mind and material processes operating in the world at large is
to a considerable degree what makes many of Dubuffet’s paintings so compel-
ling, as does the analogous way in which the paint work suggests an interplay
of inner and outer worlds in Pollock’s work. It is important though to keep in
mind the difference between the two, in particular the absence in Pollock,
even in his more representational works, of suggested social scenarios form-
ing part of the external material environment.50
Dubuffet did not have the same anxiety over designating concrete social
phenomena that haunted postwar American artists who, like him, were work-
ing in an experimental, informally painterly mode. This clearly has to do
with the cultural and political environment in France as compared with the
United States, where an often violent anticommunism and antisocialism was
taking hold.51 He could be both a modernist in his approach to processes of
painting and a realist in making explicit reference to social and political reali-
ties of the world he inhabited. This he did most evidently in a series of urban
scenarios he painted in 1961 called Paris Circus (Figure 13.2).
Here, suggestions of fluidity and malleability are constantly being inter-
rupted and blocked by accretions of matter. If Freud’s dream mechanisms
come to mind, there are also affinities with the operations of the modern
capitalist economy and its processes of circulation. Dubuffet evoked the latter
in an energetically parodic way. A common or garden attitude of looking and
taking in things—the vernacular glance—is identified with the circulation of
people, goods, and services in the modern city. The figures merge with the
wayward flow and proliferations of things in the environment around them,
at the same time that they are trapped and isolated in their own little worlds.
This urban imaginary is one in which a profusion of goods and services
mingles with intimations of cheating and financial collapse—in the work Rue
Pifre, for example, there is an establishment that offers superior quality pro-
visions, as well as one advertising a clearance sale, and offerings of “croques
miettes,” “pressed crumbs,” and a bank designating itself as a “banque crapu-
leuse.” In Le Plomb dans l’Aile’ (Shot in the Wing),52 the cityscape has become
more abstract, but still figures an interplay between the free flow of materi-
als and things and their atomizing and compartmentalizing, as well as an
irrepressible productive process that never consolidates itself into a coherent
structure or gives body to some larger purpose. There is a constant shifting
of register between verbal signs and visible things, and also an intermingling
of deceit and excess with commerce and consumption, and of crashes and
failures and swindles with abundance and growth. Taking some of the names
of the signs—reading from left to right—there is “bankrupt,” “the conman,”
“shady bank,” “money up front,” “shot in the wing,” “the timeless,” and “clos-
ing down sale.”
Such a conflation of inner and outer worlds, and of a ludicrously excessive
libidinal economy driving inner life as well as social interactions and the cir-
culation of goods in the modern environment, possibly has its closest paral-
lel, not in art of the period, but in the novels written by Céline in the 1930s,
278 Alex Potts
before his fascist turn53 —we know that Dubuffet greatly admired Céline. In
both there is an insistent confusion between the materiality of things and
the substance of psychic life, though with Dubuffet the psychically charged
materialism is less violently anarchic. There is an interesting passage in his
writings that gives voice to a Céline-like fascination with a materialist uncon-
scious that has social, psychic, and nakedly physical resonances. Matter,
Dubuffet explained, has “many diverse ideas and diverse evocations. There
is that of the uninterrupted, unlimited and non-individuated. There is that
of profusion and proliferation. There is that of incessant internal movement
and permanent transformation. There are the aspects of brusque eruptions.
Those of brutality, enormous weight, terrifying force. Those on the contrary
of infinite spaces, vertiginous voids.”54
At the same time as Dubuffet elaborated this aesthetic, he also adumbrated
a kind of materialist ethics. He saw his approach to making painting as caught
up in the broader paradoxes and irrationalities of material existence and of
our precarious and unstable sense of ourselves within a larger material disor-
der of things. Such paradox and perversity were there too in his characteriza-
tion of his artistic project as constantly oscillating between “an exaggerated
affirmation of the intervention of the psychic and manual mechanisms of
the painter” and “a total absence of intervention (presentation of facts in a
completely raw state and without intervention).” These conflations and insta-
bilities played out in his painting, which he saw as making apparent “the
arbitrary, fallacious nature of the looks we cast on all things, the precarious
and derisory nature of our interventions in a world teeming with unknown
adversarial forces and profusions about which we understand nothing and
over which we have no control.” Yet just as unexpectedly vivid resemblances
could result from processes of painting that seemed to obliterate or resist con-
scious form-making, so the intractability of the material world to human
efforts at shaping and understanding it could make evident a human affinity
with things at an intimate nonconscious level and endow human efforts with
“unsuspected and fascinating meanings.”55
In contrast to Stokes, there is a striking absence in Dubuffet of any impulse
toward contemplative poise and reparation. Instead one finds an irrepressible
striving that feeds off the irrational and unpredictable. For Dubuffet, there is
nothing beyond the constant play of impulse associated with basic psychic
process and the irrational play of forces in the material and social environ-
ment. In his activities as a painter the latter though are framed so as to con-
stitute an ongoing if ever unresolved project. His painting in effect operates
as a displaced but intensively sustained enactment of “mere living.”
Dubuffet’s ethics of artistic process is much closer to that of experimental
artists of his and later generations than is Stokes’s. Stokes’s analogy between
processes of artistic creation and viewing, on the one hand, and psychoana-
lytic process, on the other, was motivated in part by his conception of art
as offering a possibility of aesthetic reconciliation. Apprehending or creat-
ing a satisfying, confirming artistic totality, however provisional, could be
paralleled with the psychotherapeutic goal of achieving a certain poise and
equanimity and grounded sense of self and other. Interestingly Stokes him-
self suggested why painting such as Pollock and Dubuffet’s might be more
honest and compelling for not achieving this, and for not pretending that it
could do so. As he explained, the man-made environment in which we live
“obtain our projections . . . and provide an image of our culture” such that,
when snatches of the environment are abstracted in our art, we must stom-
ach in such unexampled closeness the fact that what we clasp permits no
other reverberation than itself . . . Apart from wry comment on the cultural
position, art can do little more, it seems, than keep step with what it can
neither sum nor symbolize. The artist cannot turn his back on the domi-
nant environment even though, in using it, he neither forges symbols for
it nor comments deeply.56
Art such as Dubuffet’s, or Pollock’s for that matter, may not comment, but the
vitality of the paint work and of the scenarios it conjures up bear testimony
to a capacity for making something of this environment and of the largely
uncontrollable processes shaping it, which is very compelling.
Notes
1. See, e.g., Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948, oil and enamel paint on canvas, 173 × 264
cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. An image of this painting can be accessed
online on the Museum of Modern Art website (http://www.moma.org/collection
/object.php?object_id=78699) and on the Artchive website (http://www.artchive.com
/artchive/P/pollock/1a_1948.jpg.html). Owing to very high permissions costs, it was
possible to include only a very restricted selection of the illustrations originally envis-
aged for this chapter. References are given in the notes to readily accessible online
images of those works that could not be illustrated.
2. For translations of a representative selection of Dubuffet’s statements about his art, see
Mildred Glimcher, ed., Jean Dubuffet. Towards an Alternative Reality (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1987).
3. See, e.g., the painting referenced in note 1.
4. For a critical analysis of this aspect of Pollock’s art, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea.
Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1999), 229–370.
5. Pepe Carmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1999), 8.
6. Ibid., 61. The works shown, all dating from 1947, included the painting Full Fathom Five
referenced in note 13.
7. Charles Harrison, “Jackson Pollock,” in Paul Wood, ed., Varieties of Modernism (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 139–142.
8. Carmel, Pollock, 20–21.
9. See, e.g., Jackson Pollock, Untitled drawing, JP-CR 3:53lr, 1939–40, pencil on paper,
36 × 28 cm, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Illustrated in Michael Leja,
Reframing Abstract Expressionism. Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993), 159, figure 47. The image can be accessed through
the online Google books version of Leja’s monograph ( http://books.google.com/books
?id=CxM8Wn-dLVwC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=pollock+drawing+RISD+leja&sourc
e=bl&ots=1e5O2OC7K_&sig=OQm63vDcSOILHrjrEhU6EP7DFi8&hl=en&ei=47RnTqG
-FZGv8QP3-ZjGCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwA
A#v=onepage&q&f=false).
280 Alex Potts
10. Leja, Abstract Expressionism, 121–202.

11. Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 73.
12. Carmel, Pollock, 67. See also O’Connor, Pollock, 70, and Leja, Abstract Expressionism, 315,
327.
13. Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key,
coins, cigarettes, matches, etc., 129 x 76.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. An
image can be accessed online on the Museum of Modern Art website (http://www
.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79070);and also on the Artchive website
(http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/pollock/pollock_fathom5.jpg.html).
14. Pollock’s choice of resonant titles is discussed in Clark, Farewell, 299–302.
15. Both wrote important essays on painting—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et L’Esprit
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Jean-Paul Sartre, “Doigts et Non-Doigts” (1963), Situations:
Essais Critiques, vol. IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 408–434.
16. The importance of Klein’s object relations approach for postwar British psychoanalysis
is signaled by several major publications that came out in the 1950s, such as Melanie
Klein, Paul Heimann, and R. E. Money-Kyrle, eds., New Directions in Psycho-Analysis:
The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1955), to which Adrian Stokes contributed the essay “Form in Art.”
17. On the role that Kleinian psychoanalysis played in Stokes’s writing about art, see the
essays by Richard Read, Janet Sayers, and Lindsey Stonebridge in Stephen Bann, ed.,
The Coral Mind. Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and
Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2007).
18. On Not Being Able to Paint (London: Heinemann, 1950) was first published under the
pseudonym Joanna Field, but is henceforth cited as Milner, Paint. On Milner’s under-
standing of artistic process, that contrasted strongly with Klein’s more conventional
focus on symbolic meaning, see Michael Podro, “Destructiveness and Play: Klein,
Winnicott, Milner,” in Lesley Caldwell, ed., Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition
(London: Karnac Books, 2007), 24–32.
19. Milner, Paint, 47
20. See later the commentary by Dubuffet referenced in note 43.
21. Milner, Paint, 96, 124–125.
22. Ibid., 148.
23. Ibid., 159.
24. He had published a book on the subject more than ten years previously, The
Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing; An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious
Perception (London: Routledge & Paul, 1953), but did not there undertake a critical anal-
ysis of tendencies in modern painting. On Ehrenzweig’s theories of artistic perception,
see the review of The Hidden Order of Art in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27.3
(1969), 349–360.
25. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art. A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 272–273.
26. Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1973),
54–81.
27. Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order, 102–103.
28. Carmel, Pollock, 18, from statement published in 1947–48.
29. Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order, 66–67.
30. Ibid., 119.
31. Ibid., 121.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 67. See also 61.
34. Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art (London: Tavistock Publications, 1965), 17–18, 21.
Stokes has been the subject of several recent studies, most notably Bann, Coral Mind
and Richard Read, Art and Its Discontents. The Early Life of Adrian Stokes (University Park,
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
35. Stokes, Invitation, 23.
36. Adrian Stokes, Painting and the Inner World (London: Tavistock Publications, 1963), 52.
Stokes’s psychoanalytic exploration of the symbiosis between inner and outer objects
and spaces, Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space (London:
Faber and Faber, 1947), is discussed in Richard Read, “Vico, Virginia Woolf and
Adrian Stokes’s Autobiographies: Fantasy, Providence and Isolation in Post-War British
Aesthetics,”, Art History, 35, 4 (September 2012), 779–93.
38. Ibid., 29.
39. The work of Jackson Pollock and the American Abstract Expressionists began to make
a major impact in the British art world in the late 1950s with two major exhibitions in
London, Jackson Pollock at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1958, and The New American
Painting at the Tate Gallery in 1959.
40. Adrian Stokes, Three Essays on the Painting of Our Time (London: Tavistock Publications,
1961), 6, 18.
41. Ibid., 39. Pollock once famously stated: “When I am in my painting, I am not aware of
what I’m doing” (Carmel, Pollock, 18).
42. Stokes, Three Essays, 5–6.
43. Adrian Stokes, “The Future in Art (1972),” in Adrian Stokes, A Game That Must Be Lost
(Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1973), 59–60.
44. “Dubuffet Paints a Picture,” Art News 51.3 (May 1952), 32–33, 66. See, e.g., Jean
Dubuffet, Voyageur san boussole (traveler without a compass), 1952, 118 × 155 cm, oil
on putty ground on hardboard, Centre Pompidou. An image can be accessed online
on the Centre Pompidou website (http://collection.centrepompidou.fr/Navigart/slide
/slide_main.php?so=oeu_nom_prem&it=2&cc=0&is_sel=0).
45. See, e.g., Jean Dubuffet, La vie affairé (the busy life), oil on canvas, 130 × 195 cm, Tate.
An image can be accessed online on the Tate website (http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet
/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=4021&searchid=9491&tabview=image).
46. Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et Tous Écrits Suivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), vol. II, 101
(from a text written in 1957).
47. Dubuffet, Prospectus, II, 75 (from a text first published in 1953).
48. Dubuffet, Prospectus, I, 72 (from a text first published 1946).
49. Jean Dubuffet, “Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” in
Peter Selz, ed., The Work of Jean Dubuffet (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 72.
50. In a critique quite common among critics on the left in Europe and the United Kingdom,
John Berger, responding to Pollock’s 1958 show at the Whitechapel, argued that, for
all the magnificence of this work as painting, it was vitiated by a refusal to engage
with outer social and political realities—“His paintings are like pictures painted on the
inside walls of his mind . . . ,”, O’Conner, Pollock, 77.
51. On how the artistic subjectivity informing postwar American Abstract Expressionist
painting’s commitment to nonrepresentation was shaped by the political climate of
the time, see Leja, Abstract Expressionism, particularly 36–48, 245–253, 268–274. The
antisocialist and anticommunist climate of postwar American had an impact too on
artists who remained committed to a form of social realism—see Andrew Hemingway,
Artists on the Left. American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–1956 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press), 225–282.
52. Jean Dubuffet, Le plomb dans L’aile (Shot in the Wing), oil on canvas, 190 × 250 cm, Detroit
Institute of Arts. An image can be accessed online on the Bridgeman Art Library web
site (http://www.bridgemanart.com/search?filter_text=dubuffet+plomb&x=28&y=12).
53. Louis-Fernand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment
Plan (1936).
54. Dubuffet, Prospectus, II, 467 (letter dated 1961).
55. Dubuffet, Prospectus, II, 467.
14
The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological
Knowledge and the Making of
the British Welfare State
Rhodri Hayward
Over recent decades, historians, sociologists and policymakers have begun to

pursue the psyche in earnest. From histories of fear and empathy to policy
initiatives in education and social welfare, the psyche appears as an elusive
but authoritative entity that will provide the grounds of an effective politics
and reveal the inner meaning of historical experience. Much has been made
of the novelty of these developments. The rise of the so-called happiness
agenda is presented by its apostles as a new kind of political dispensation.1
Similarly historians who have embraced psychoanalytic and neuropsycho-
logical insights in their writings believe that this has allowed them to escape
the cultural theorists’ dead-end obsession with discourse and representation.2
Yet despite the promise and energy associated with these new approaches, the
pursuit of the psyche has been marked by a certain ambivalence. Although
researchers might celebrate their engagement with psychological life, this
engagement is often perceived as demonstrating the limitations of their dis-
ciplines. Despite the broadly accepted idea that role and identity is socially
constructed, some small aspect of selfhood remains beyond the scope of
sociological or economic explanation. Thus in the writings of some contem-
porary historians on subjectivity, the real essence of the self is located outside
history in, for instance, a different temporal order of evolutionary adapta-
tion, a neurobiological affect program or the romantic sublime of the deep
unconscious, which is said to resist the claims of social determinism and
narrative representation.3 In these accounts historians only effectively deal
with subjectivity when they recognize the inadequacy of their professional
methodologies.
The ambivalence inherent in these approaches reflects a human world por-
trayed as sharply divided between the flux of historical experience and a
283
284 Rhodri Hayward
psychic reality containing elements that remain constant over time.4 This
division tends to be preserved in the stories we tell ourselves about the growth
of psychological understanding in Britain. In the writings of psychoanalytic
enthusiasts and their hostile critics, the development of a psychodynamic
perspective remains isolated from the changing historical experience of the
British population at the start of the twentieth century. Its growth is depicted
instead as a kind of slow enlightenment in which concepts developed in
Central European consulting rooms are taken up in the United Kingdom
through a combination of missionary efforts, Machiavellian politicking, lurid
press coverage, or literary experimentation.5 Such accounts—which treat the
growth of a psychological consciousness as an elaborate game of Chinese
whispers—have their uses, but they do little to explain why historical actors
may have chosen to adopt this new vocabulary. Instead they borrow from the
logic of psychotherapy, suggesting that the encounter with psychoanalysis
granted the population the language and awareness they needed to express
their real feelings: feelings that could not be articulated through the conven-
tional discourse of Victorian and Edwardian Britain.6
In this chapter I do two things. First, I offer an alternative account
of the growth of psychological understanding and experience in early
twentieth-century Britain. Instead of attributing its growth to a process of
intellectual enlightenment, I show how this new sensibility was grounded in
certain practical changes in the nation’s political and economic life. Second,
I show how the new kinds of experience generated by these changes, in turn,
created a novel domain of political action. I examine mid-twentieth-century
psychological welfare schemes—schemes that bear a superficial similarity to
the happiness policies pursued today. These schemes however were organized
around very different concepts and with very different materials. Whereas
twenty-first-century political interventions are structured around ideas of
happiness and depression, mid-twentieth-century schemes were coordinated
around the concepts of anxiety and security. The distinctiveness of these
schemes demonstrates the transience of the psychological categories used to
ground such interventions, and, perhaps more interestingly, it suggests that
the psyche itself may be continually reconstituted as modes of production
and social organization change. The psychologies used to establish historical
arguments and legitimate political and economic decisions are themselves
constituted through those decisions and the materials and relationships that
arise from them. As this chapter will demonstrate, in mid-twentieth-century
Britain the experience and understanding of anxiety was transformed
through its relationship to schemes of welfare reform.
* * *
Over the last two decades sociologists and philosophers of science have begun
to turn away from the familiar vision of a universe populated with fixed and
discrete objects to emphasize the unstable and emergent properties of forces
and matter. Drawing upon a number of philosophical forebears including
The Pursuit of Serenity 285
Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, they have argued that physical
and psychological phenomena can only be understood in terms of the con-
tingent networks of tools, theories, and practices that sustain them.7 Instead
of taking the objects of scientific analysis (be they subatomic quarks or psy-
chiatric illnesses) as givens, they have looked at how these objects are made
visible, tangible, and effective. In the case of psychological phenomena, the
constitutive role of language and social activity is clear. The development of
new psychological concepts changes human experience and thus produces
new phenomena. As the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argues: “Psychology
is not only the study of human thinking, feeling, acting and interacting:
it has itself—like other human sciences—brought into being new ways of
thinking, feeling, acting and interacting.”8 When we deploy psychological
concepts such as “stress,” “intelligence,” or “multiple personality disorder,”
we are not simply pointing to preexisting referents; rather, we constellate
certain aspects of life, creating particular connections and associations, and
thus creating new psychological states.9 These new states, however, are not
sustained by language alone. New categories and phenomena are embedded
in particular forms of practical action and social organization.10 Through
their location in this extended network, the phenomena obtain a certain
robustness. They have a life of their own and these robust creations in turn
make possible new forms of identity and new kinds of action. They are, in
Kurt Danziger’s words, “psychological objects.”11 These psychological objects
are capable of changing the world.
This chapter looks at the historical transformation of a particular psycho-
logical object—anxiety—and its connection to programs of welfare reform
in the early twentieth century. Forms of worry, foreboding, apprehension,
anguish, unease, and disquiet have always been with us, but it was only at
the end of the nineteenth century that the anxiety neuroses were delineated
as a distinct pathological condition through the work of Sigmund Freud and
Wiesbaden psychiatrist Ewald Hecker.12 A number of psychological, somatic,
and cognitive states such as nervousness, arrhythmia, and obsession that had
previously been taken on their own terms were now brought together and
understood as symptoms of an underlying disorder. Anxiety neurosis, Freud
argued, included irritability, anxious expectation, anxiety attacks, night wak-
ing, and conditions such as vertigo, palpitations, tremors, and gastric disor-
ders.13 The symptoms were united by their common origin in accumulated
sexual excitation. What had once been seen as discrete individual reactions
to an uncompromising environment were now taken as aspects of a distinct
neuropathological process. In bringing together these symptoms, Freud and
Hecker transformed their significance. Anxiety, which had once described an
attitude to impending events, became symptomatic of psychophysiological
frustration. An attitude was transformed into a condition and a new psycho-
pathological identity—“the anxiety neurotic”—appeared. Yet this object did
not remain stable. In Freud’s own writings the meaning of anxiety would shift
from failed libidinal discharge to a psychic mechanism that protected the
subject from reencountering trauma.14 Anxiety thus provides a good example
286 Rhodri Hayward
of how the form and meaning of a condition was established through a net-
work of relationships. Here, I concentrate on one element in this network:
the relationship between the changing meaning of anxiety and the history
of British welfare reform.
The system of welfare administration that grew up around late Victorian
and Edwardian experiments in social insurance and workmen’s compensa-
tion introduced new kinds of psychological objects into British society. The
most significant elements in this system were the Workmen’s Compensation
Acts of 1897, 1906, and 1923 and the National Health Insurance Act of 1911.15
The 1897 Act built upon earlier experiments in employee protection, consoli-
dating the notion of employer liability. The 1906 Act opened up the possibil-
ity of redress for industrial disease.16 Although only 7 diseases were scheduled
in the initial legislation, 25 were included by 1913.17 By 1935 (allowing for
informality of recording) it appears that over 17 million manual workers were
included within its ambit and over 6,000 compensation cases were reaching
the courts each year.18
As has been widely noted, the welfare framework created around industrial
accident and disease in Britain encouraged litigation.19 Whereas in Germany
disputes were conducted through state-appointed arbitrators, British cases
were referred to insurance tribunals or—more commonly after 1923—the
courts, and it was in these institutions, I want to argue, that the dynamic
psyche was defined and sustained.20 Such legal disputes opened up the space
of the psyche in three ways. First, in the arguments surrounding compensa-
tion cases, illnesses and injuries were transformed from accidents that simply
befell an individual to complex events bound up with the personal motiva-
tions of the sufferer. Thus in early disputes over compensation for workplace
injuries and railway accidents, the forms of illness and neuroses presented
after traumatic events were attributed by medical examiners to the litigant’s
unconscious desire for monetary reward.21 Second, in these disputes notions
of shock and trauma were deployed to break down familiar ideas of mechani-
cal causality, introducing in its stead an etiology linking present-day disor-
ders to long-forgotten events.22 Symptoms that arose long after an accident
occurred were joined to it through the idea of shock. The notion of “proxi-
mate causation” (which had been used to establish limits to legal liability) was
extended, as physical accidents were now understood as involving ongoing
psychophysiological process.23 The concept of shock could establish seamless
narratives between any event and symptom. Third, these disputes changed
the nature of the doctor-patient relationship. They turned patients from cli-
ents into claimants, whose declarations about their symptoms required inter-
rogation.24 Psychological explanations of functional illness helped to mediate
these oppositional relationships. Such explanations could be used to police
claims for industrial compensation while at the same time defusing any possi-
ble element of confrontation in the doctor-patient encounter.25 In the reports
of medical examiners, it was this putative “unconscious” rather than the
claimant that was held up as the dissimulating agent in pursuit of financial
reward.26 Typical cases might include a cooper whose apparent loss of feeling
in his right hand (tactile agnosia) was attributed to unconscious resentment

about working hours, or a shorthand typist whose frequent and suspect nerv-
ous spasms were reinterpreted in terms of subconscious insecurity.27 Notions
of unconscious motivation allowed adversarial relationships to be redescribed
in therapeutic terms.28
The inquisitorial form of the insurance relationship did not simply sustain a
particular emotion or form of psychological rhetoric: it went much deeper than
this. It created new forms of experience and self-understanding. The schemes’
critics complained that the patient’s identity was transformed by the rewards
and investigatory procedures involved in workmen’s compensation. In 1911,
Sir Dyce Duckworth, the medical examiner for the Treasury, complained that
the acts had fostered an epidemic of working-class neurasthenia, which under-
mined recoveries from industrial accidents.29 Two years later, John Collie, the
medical examiner for London County Council, described how the process of
litigation itself became embodied in the litigant: “[C]ontemplated legal proce-
dure engraves deeper and deeper on the brain cells what should be the phantom
memory picture of an accident,” creating hysterical injuries in place of “the real
physical disabilities which have long since disappeared.”30 William Thorburn,
the president of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Neurological Section, endorsed
this view. “Since the passing of the Workmen’s Compensation Act,” he wrote
in 1913, a new type of compensation has arisen, and not unnaturally the trau-
matic neuroses have been modified thereby.”31 Thorburn claimed that the old
forms of gross hysteria, such as physical paralysis, were being replaced by a new
and more complex form of delayed neurosis: “a type less commonly seen in the
last century, less acute in onset, far more insidious, gradually increasing and
becoming so intensified with time.”32
The acts, it was thought, encouraged new forms of suffering. The network of
expectations and grievances instituted by the new procedures promoted “a sort
of subconscious malingering in which the patient herself is deceived as well as,
and sometimes even more than, others about her.”33 These arguments became
familiar during World War I as the remit of the Workmen’s Compensation Acts
was extended and new pension regimes were instituted.34 Shell-shock helped to
cement this new understanding of anxiety as a pathological force that changed
the meaning and experience of administrative procedures and with it meaning
and experience of individual illness.35
After 1918, government investigations into war neurosis and compensable
industrial conditions, such as writer’s cramp or miner’s nystagmus (an invol-
untary oscillation of the eyeball), established a new consensus around this
psychological reading of physical illnesses.36 Individual conditions were now
caught up in a larger framework of meanings—of fears and rewards around
loss and compensation—and were reinterpreted in psychological terms.
Everything that now touched on the worker’s condition was invested with psy-
chological significance. Parliamentary committees on the effectiveness of the
Workmen’s Compensation schemes were repeatedly warned of the emotional
costs of the legislation. In 1920 the Holman Gregory Committee reported that
protracted settlements “involve worry and in many causes introspection and
288 Rhodri Hayward
depression.” Claims investigation created an ongoing anxiety, which, as one

insurance agent noted, was a “prolific cause in retarding recovery.”37 Eighteen
years later, the Stewart Committee noted with dismay that “a disorder [neu-
rasthenia] in which the development of which anxiety can play so detrimen-
tal a part, should be the subject of so much uncertainty and conflict” under
current legislation.38 Members of both committees endorsed the conclusions
of earlier Medical Research Council investigations into nystagmus, holding
that pathological anxiety could only be relieved through the replacement of
disability pensions with lump sum compensation payments. These inquiries
revealed the coconstitutive relationship between psychology and legislation,
as the anxieties created in the administration of the schemes became the
bases of their reformulation.39
As the machinery of welfare provision changed the experience of ill-
ness it opened up new forms of psychological observation and created new
registers of psychological expression. After World War I, 216 outpatient
clinics were established to deal with service claims for psychiatric injury.40
Although many of these psychiatric clinics closed down within a few years,
those that remained were used by pioneer social psychiatrists to survey
working-class life.41 The clinics, it was claimed, provided clear evidence
of the growth of anxiety states, their changing class distribution and the
emotional poverty of working-class life.42 This evidence led, as Mathew
Thomson has noted, to a reconceptualization of the anxiety neuroses and
neurasthenia. They were no longer the preserve of the exhausted aesthete
or the overstretched white-collar worker.43 Neurasthenia was now associ-
ated with the insecurities of unemployment and industrial injury and the
frustrations of modern living. It was understood and experienced as a neu-
rotic form of anxiety.44
At one level this flight into the anxiety state was seen in terms of the popu-
lation’s psychological transition.45 It was a transition in which the language
of distress lost its familiar markers of gender and class. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, the renegade Viennese analyst Wilhelm Reich had
noted of his working-class patients in Germany:
The neuroses of the working population are different in that they lack the
cultural refinement of the others. They are a crude undisguised rebellion
against the psychic massacre to which we are all subjected. The well-to do
citizen carries his neurosis with dignity, or he lives it out in one or another
way. In people of the working population it shows itself out in the gro-
tesque tragedy which it really is.46
Yet by the 1930s Reich’s “crude undisguised rebellions” seemed to have

undergone a process of gentrification. In Britain, neurologists and physicans
claimed that the old-fashioned hysterias were being replaced in the era of
national insurance by a new breed of anxiety states.47 Kinnier Wilson, a reg-
istrar at the National Hospital, Queen Square, insisted that the turn to psy-
chodynamic investigations had led to a transformation in the presentation
and experience of hysteria. The old hysteric, he reminisced, was like a circus
horse that
[n]ever failed to respond to the calls made on her. But today we seek the
clue to the ailment in the unseen psyche, and she is somewhat at a loss;
accordingly her elaborated somatic manifestations are rather at a discount.
A cold scientific environment besets her, instead of a world of emotional
extravagance and limitless credulity. So a defence-hysteria is now “a la
mode,” . . . [and] the hysteric turns to the possibility of compensation for
trauma, or seeks to escape from unpleasant reality by a flight into neu-
rosis—at least, so we are assured. The times have changed, and we, both
physicians and hysterics, have changed with them.48
The social significance of these changing presentations was brought out

in studies of war neurosis. During World War I it was a commonplace obser-
vation among neurologists and alienists that true anxiety neuroses were
generally limited to officers while the gross hysterias, such as paralysis and
aphonia, were present among other ranks.49 By the time of World War II this
distinction had broken down.50 A new demotic idiom for mental distress had
been established: an idiom expressed through the physical torments of the
“psychosomatic” disorders.51
These psychosomatic disorders—which encompassed an ever-increasing
range of physical conditions including allergy, ulcer, goiter, gastritis, and infer-
tility—were themselves taken as markers of the changing patterns of psycho-
logical distress between the sexes. As the physical manifestations of hysteria
declined so did the distribution of psychosomatic conditions. Peptic ulcer,
goiter, and hypertension—which in the nineteenth century were believed to
predominate in women—came to be seen as male diseases. Similarly diabe-
tes and suicide, it was claimed, became predominantly female illnesses in the
interwar period. This “sex shift,” as it was called, was taken as an index of the
changing psychological state of the British population.52
As presentations changed, so too did the meaning of anxiety. Among English
commentators the concept lost its psychoanalytic associations.53 Although it
could still denote frustration, this was usually seen in social and economic
rather than sexual terms. And the mnemonic and protective properties that
Freud attributed to anxiety were collapsed in British writings into a more
colloquial equivalence of anxiety with mental anguish. While this process
robbed the concept of much of its theoretical complexity, it allowed the emo-
tion to be read into many situations.54 Through the emergent language of
psychosomatic medicine, any number of symptoms could now be presented
as evidence of individual’s anxious condition. And it is in this moment we
can see how the apparatus of welfare administration could itself become a
register of psychological distress. The equation of anxiety with an agreed col-
lection of physical complaints—the psychosomatic manifestations—allowed
this inner state to be subjected to statistical analyses and epidemiological
investigations. The presentation of sickness claims and the changing record
290 Rhodri Hayward
of the birth rate now obtained a psychological significance: they became

indices of the changing levels of anxiety in the population.
* * *
State welfare schemes extended the register of emotional expression. Whereas

individual feeling was inscribed upon the body, the psychological state of
the population was traced out in the changing pattern of insurance returns.
And as reference to the emotional state of an individual changes the meaning
of a situation, so too did reference to population’s feelings change the sig-
nificance of the political situation.55 Insurance administration provided the
stage for new kinds of relationships and new forms of embodiment and the
apparatus for turning these new experiences into quantifiable phenomena.
Through these processes it allowed the psychological forces presented across
the worker’s body to be read against broader political and historical trans-
formations. The process of welfare administration populated the world with
psychological objects—objects that would serve to guide national policy.
The coupling of psychosomatic arguments with welfare administration
opened up a new domain of political action. It connected individual behavior,
social organization, welfare costs, and economic performance within a seam-
less whole. From the beginning of the 1930s, it was claimed that there was a
psychoneurotic component in roughly one-third of outpatient presentations
and national insurance claims.56 Neurosis, it was averred, affected three mil-
lion Britons at an annual cost of forty million pounds to the exchequer.57 Such
arguments were initially used to underline the need for schemes of psychiatric
welfare and the building of outpatient clinics.58 By the end of the 1930s, as we
will see, these psychological estimates were being used to critique established
forms of social organization.
The leading exponents of these arguments were officials involved in the
administration of insurance claims. James Halliday, assessor for the Glasgow
Regional Health Board, was a leading proponent of the idea that the British
population had undergone a psychosomatic transition in the twentieth centu-
ry.59 He drew upon the unorthodox analytic ideas of Ian Suttie who had traced
individual cases of neurosis to maternal separation and extended his argu-
ment to claim that collective anxiety stemmed from the workers’ increasing
separation from communal life and mother earth.60 Richard Titmuss, working
for the London Branch of the County Fire Office Insurance company, saw in
the changing pattern of fertility statistics an indication of the broader failures
of modern capitalism.61 It was, he argued, a result of the increasing individu-
alism fostered by economic competition and the demoralizing fear of unem-
ployment.62 During World War II, Titmuss and Halliday would vastly expand
the number of indices of psychic distress. Working with the epidemiologist
Jerry Morris, Titmuss attempted to map changing presentations of rheumatic
illness and ulceration onto the changing psychological experiences of the
British population.63 In the actuarial psychosomatics that Halliday and Ryle
developed, we can see how the body was used to benchmark forms of social
and industrial organization. Psychic distress was no longer read in terms of

individual frustration or disappointment but instead caught up in a narrative
of national life. The psyche, traced out in these insurance returns, became the
touchstone for political justice.
This new conception of the psyche changed the basis of politics. Perhaps the
clearest demonstration of this transformation occurred in the Coronation Bus
Strike of May 1937, the endpoint of a four-year dispute between the London
Passenger Transport Board, the Transport and General Workers Union,
and the Rank and File Busmen’s Movement. This dispute over the intensi-
fied working conditions imposed following the amalgamation of London’s
bus services in 1933 is now largely remembered for the tensions it revealed
between the TUC and the rank and file movement.64 However, it also marked
a significant transformation in the basis of labor relations. The resolution of
the busmen’s claim rested not upon the relative collective bargaining power
of worker and employer but psychological, etiological, and epidemiological
arguments over the nature of busman’s stomach—a new form of gastritis—
arising, it was claimed, from the peculiar levels of strain, anxiety, and fatigue
the workers experienced.65 This new condition had been the stuff of anec-
dotes since the beginning of the 1930s but it took on a life of its own in the
sickness returns kept by approved societies of London United Tramways and
the London General Omnibus Company.66 Under pressure from the unions
and the Labour Party, the Medical Research Council commissioned Austin
Bradford Hill to carry out two inquiries into the severity of gastric distur-
bance among busworkers.67 Although Hill remained ambivalent about the
condition, the mere fact of the epidemiological investigation turned a sta-
tistical pattern into a pathological object with its own discrete distribution
and characteristics. In two industrial courts of inquiry held in May and July
1937 and a subsequent interdepartmental committee investigation two years
later, the search for economic and political settlement was mediated through
arguments over the busmen’s psychological and psychosomatic health.68 The
inquiries demonstrated the shift from a language of rights based on custom
and duty to claims based in the language of psychology and physiology.69
It was a shift from what E. P. Thompson termed “the moral economy” to
a new “psychological economy” in which working conditions were negoti-
ated through reference to anxiety, morale, and danger of mental injury.70
Psychological knowledge thus transformed the basis of industrial relations.
Although issues such as working hours and labor conditions had long been
the focus of disputes, these disputes were now resolved through reference to
psychological objects measured and assessed in professional investigations.
* * *
The psychological needs articulated in the economic demands and physical

complaints of Britain’s workers, and abstracted through the epidemiologi-
cal techniques of social medicine, created a new political landscape. It was a
landscape where the circulation of emotion and desire was believed to affect
292 Rhodri Hayward
the circulation and distribution of capital. John Maynard Keynes, who had
long recognized the role of “animal spirits” in the determination of consumer
behavior, argued that psychological knowledge was a crucial element in eco-
nomic forecasting.71 “In estimating the prospects of investment,” he wrote in
1936, “we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even
the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous
activity it largely depends.”72
However in the generation of economists that followed Keynes, particu-
larly those associated with the Labour Party and the New Fabian Research
Bureau, the emotional factors in the economy were reimagined in terms of
the quantifiable psychological conditions described in the work of Titmuss
and Halliday. Barbara Wootton, citing Alfred Marshall’s well-known defini-
tion of economics as “that part of the individual and social action which is
most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material
requisites of wellbeing,” argued that the boundaries of economics had been
redrawn by the production of conditions such as nystagmus.73 Nystagmus
was held up by proponents of the new social medicine as a disease emblem-
atic of the psychological environment.74 Its character and aetiology had been
defined in the debates around Workmen’s Compensation and its presence
was taken as an index of the stress and insecurity experienced in the mining
community.75 As Wootton noted in A Lament for Economics, since nystagmus
was an affliction produced by coal mining it must be counted “among the
influences which affect the supply of labour in coal-mining, the wages of
coal miners and the price of coal.” “In this way,” she explained, “the bounda-
ries of economic studies as plotted by Marshall might be found to include
discussions of the nature of human needs, physiological and psychological,
not to mention philosophical speculations as to the meaning of wellbeing.”76
Psychological life became a central component of economic planning.77
The clearest articulation of this viewpoint came from Wootton’s close col-
league Evan Durbin. Working at London School of Economics and after 1940
with the Economic Secretariat of the War Cabinet, Durbin argued that the
Keynesian guarantee of economic security through state planning could only
be achieved if it were underwritten by a new sense of psychological security
achieved through a nationwide system of therapeutic intervention.78 In his
personal manifesto, The Politics of Democratic Socialism, written shortly before
he joined the government, Durbin outlined his vision of a psychological wel-
fare state:
Although wealth, physical health and social equality may all make their
contributions to human happiness, they can all do little and cannot them-
selves be secured without health in the individual mind . . . The only hope
for the creation of firm and lasting happiness in society lies in the greater
emotional health of the persons composing it . . . The greatest achievement
of the scientific method in this century, and the greatest hope for the future
benefit of mankind, lies in the therapy for mind and spirit discovered by
modern psychological science. In the light of those discoveries, and by
means of its curative practices and above all by its preventative techniques,
humanity may hope in the future to conquer the neuroses of fear and
hatred from which the most horrible things in society now spring.79
Durbin’s belief in the redemptive power of psychoanalytic intervention was

inspired by his close and productive friendship with John Bowlby: a friend-
ship that lasted from their first meeting at Oxford in 1927 through to Durbin’s
untimely death in the summer of 1948.80 Durbin drew from Bowlby the idea
that problems such as international aggression or economic growth could
only be understood if one recognized the play of psychological forces in the
political process.81 He urged his fellow politicians to employ “psychological
microscopes” that would reveal how institutions of “government, party and
property” were merely “a thousand fragments of personal ambition and patri-
otism, of secret love and hatred, unconscious purpose and need.”82
This sense of government and society as a field of psychological forces was
embraced during World War II. Durbin’s friend and fellow Fabian, the psy-
chiatrist Stephen Taylor, argued for the institution of new systems for sur-
veying and managing anxiety—which was now seen as the key to morale.
Drafted into the Ministry of Information, Taylor drew upon a broad range of
organizations and medical professionals to estimate the levels of neuroses in
the population. Taylor’s work is now fairly well known, in part because his
studies of civilian neuroses became central to later debates among historians
over British wartime morale and the “myth of the Blitz.”83 At one level these
debates rehearse Taylor’s own efforts, and those of his contemporaries, by
picking over illness presentations and aspects of behavior in order to estab-
lish different readings of the psychology of the population.
Taylor’s attempt to reconstruct the national psyche reinforced the equation
that he and his colleagues made between social medicine and political action.
As Taylor noted, the Labour party agenda of social reconstruction and the pub-
lic health agenda of psychological medicine coincided around this issue: anxi-
ety could only be dealt with through economic intervention. Writing in the
wake of the Beveridge Report, which could now be seen as a kind of social pana-
cea, he argued that the way to health and happiness “lay not in the medicine
cupboard” or “the pages of Keep Fit magazines” but in the pragmatic pursuit of
social reconstruction. This would involve the provision of decent foodstuffs,
the construction of new houses and homes, the guarantee of income to remove
insecurity, and the establishment of a system of socialized medicine to remove
the anxiety of sickness and its associated costs from the British family. The prag-
matic way, Taylor argued, was the way pursued by the Labour Party.84
* * *
This language of public emotion and social neurosis became central to the
Labour Party program after 1945. It underpinned debates on postwar plan-
ning and the organization of the welfare state.85 It shaped ministerial rhet-
oric and defined the horizons of the political programs.86 Aneurin Bevan,
294 Rhodri Hayward
despite his differences with Durbin and Gaitskell, became an enthusiastic

exponent of the possibilities of social psychiatry. In September 1945, shortly
after becoming Minister of Health, Bevan warned members of the Royal
Medico-Psychological Association that “many of the maladjustments and
neuroses of modern society” arose directly from poverty and insecurity.
“Unless,” he added “we were able to plan our social life intelligently, with
a design and purpose into which the individual could adapt himself there
will be more mental maladies which no clinical measures could solve.”87
Psychological problems demanded political solutions.
Bevan’s ideal of social planning was grounded in an eclectic psychology
drawn from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources. He likened
society to an organism “except that it has no head and therefore no mecha-
nism with which to receive and coordinate the [nervous] vibrations.”’88 This
organicist metaphor was drawn from the work of Herbert Spencer but it was
animated through reference to the early dynamic psychology of the neurolo-
gist Wilfred Trotter (brother-in-law to pioneer British psychoanalyst Ernest
Jones) who had described human life as an ongoing conflict between the
herd and sex instincts. This shifting language has usually been seen as part of
the tension in Labour thought between the old language of ethical socialism
and a growing commitment to technocratic planning.89 However the lan-
guage and instruments of the new psychology allowed abstract ideals such as
communitarianism and citizenship to be recast as problems of psychological
health.
Durbin and Taylor, supported by a number of senior ministers including
Hugh Gaitskell and Stafford Cripps, began to see the planned economy as a
kind of therapeutic state in which psychological health would be achieved
through effective social interventions.90 Government ministers, particu-
larly those associated with the Labour Party Research Department and the
New Fabian Research Bureau, began to explore the possibility of psychologi-
cal planning drawing upon the Tavistock Institute’s work on human rela-
tions.91 In September 1945, Durbin and Cole organized a conference on the
“Sociological and Psychological Problems of Modern Socialism,” in which they
argued (following Bowlby) that the Labour program could only become effec-
tive through the libidinization of policy. Responding to Margaret Cole’s com-
plaint that “the promoters of cinemas, greyhound racing and Butlin camps,
have shown a much livelier and more imaginative sense of the demands and
sentiments of a large citizen body than have its professed organisers,” Bowlby
argued for new forms of psychosocial intervention.92 As he noted, “Since the
capacity to libidinize long-term ends, social leaders and the group itself is
clearly critical for all co-operative effort” it became necessary to tackle all
forms of personal insecurity and anxiety stretching back to maternal separa-
tion.93 In his role as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Works, Durbin
pressed Herbert Morrison in April 1946 to institute a program of preventa-
tive psychiatry in which vulnerable adults, teenagers, and children would be
subject to psychological screening and therapeutic counseling through the
planned new health centers.94
Although Durbin’s campaign was cut short by his death, the ideal of pre-
ventative psychiatry enjoyed broad support among the professions. In 1945,
a joint meeting of the Royal Colleges, the British Medical Association, and
the Royal Medico-Psychological Association issued a statement claiming that:
“Where psychiatry begins and ends has not been settled. Within the develop-
ment of preventative medicine its borders will become less rather than more
definite.” Like Durbin, Bevan, and Taylor, they argued that what they called
“the extrinsic factors of psychopathology”—the anxieties generated by eco-
nomic insecurity and domestic unhappiness—were now the proper targets of
social medicine.95 The old Labour evils of poor housing and unemployment
were now recast in the language of morbid psychology.
The experience of anxiety that had been made evident through the machin-
ery of welfare administration now provided, in part, the rhetorical founda-
tions of that machinery. Anxiety, as a psychological object, brought together
different aspects of life—the social, the somatic, the psychological, and the
political—allowing new forms of government and therapy to be imagined. Yet
no single stable element underlay these processes and investigations. Rather
the form and nature of personality, emotion, and government were constantly
redefined through their relationship with each other. Anxiety, which had
moved in Freud’s arguments from being a symptom of libidinal frustration
to a mnemonic for forgotten dangers, was now held up as a demand for social
integration.96 In the writings of the long-standing members of the British psy-
choanalytic establishment, particularly those inspired by the work of Melanie
Klein, integration, rather than satisfaction, became the key to psychological
health.97 The neurotic’s complaint was transformed into a demand for a new
social order.
* * *
The welfare state created new psychological objects and these objects in turn
shaped the emergence of the welfare state. Yet the categories and conditions
that emerged within these new forms of welfare administration—suburban
neurosis, busman’s stomach, and nervous fatigue—enjoyed only the most
transitory existence. Anxiety, which had provided the psychological touch-
stone for postwar welfare schemes, would, by the 1960s, lose its leading
position among the psychiatric diagnoses. It was eclipsed by a rising tide of
clinical depression.98
While historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, and epidemiologists may argue
over the basis of this shift—and its seems likely that much of the transforma-
tion can be attributed to a process of diagnostic reclassification driven by the
pressures of pharmaceutical marketing—it is worth noting that the rise of
depression entails new forms of political action.99 Although the meanings of
depression are contested, in the writings of social epidemiologists and evolu-
tionary psychologists, the condition is related to problems of hierarchy, loss,
and social justice.100 We can only look forward to the political transformation
that this psychological object might encourage.
296 Rhodri Hayward
If historians are to turn away from discourse in an attempt to somehow con-

front the fleeting psyche, then the changing patterns of suffering and somatiza-
tion experienced across the British population in the twentieth century would
seem a good place to begin. These changing patterns, however, do not reveal
a deep subjectivity that somehow escaped historical determination. Rather it
is a psyche both constituted in and working to constitute new political settle-
ments.101 Our attempts to grasp the psyche—whether in the administration of
an insurance claim, the development of national policy, or the writing of nar-
rative histories—endow it with new characteristics and qualities. History is not
an inadequate measure of psychological change: rather it is all too adequate. In
its attempts to grasp the inner life, it populates the world with new psychologi-
cal objects and, through this process, self and society are made anew.
Notes
1. Nicola Bacon, Marcia Brophy, Nina Mguni, Geoff Mulgan, and Anna Shandro, The
State of Happiness, Can Public Policy Shape Wellbeing and Resilience (London: The Young
Foundation, 2009); Richard Layard, Happiness, Lessons from a New Science (London:
Allen Lane, 2005); Danny Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, Well-being Over Time in
Britain and the USA. Warwick Economic Research Papers no. 616, 2001; R. E. Lane, The
Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (London: Yale University Press, 2000); [Office
of National Statistics], Measuring National Wellbeing, National Statistician’s Reflections on
the National Debate on Measuring Wellbeing (Newport: HMSO, 2011).
2. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn
Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
1–34.
3. For the attempt to locate the emotional life in a different temporal order (the evolu-
tionary environment of earliest adaptation), see Daniel L. Smail, On Deep History and
the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Lynn Hunt, “The Experience
of Revolution,” French Historical Studies 32. (2009), 671–678 On neurobiology, see
J. Carter Wood, “The Limits of Culture? Society, Evolutionary Psychology and
Violence,,” Cultural and Social History 4 (2007), 95–114; Avner Offer, The Challenge of
Affluence (Oxford: Oxfor University Press, 2003), 294–298, 347–355. For recent histo-
ries of subjectivity that seek to reserve a place for selfhood outside the play of discourse
and representation, see James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives, Mass Observation and the
Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19; Michael Roper,
“Slipping Out of View, Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender history,” History Workshop
Journal 59.1 (2005), 57–72.
4. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Brighton: University Paperbacks,
1981), 22.
5. There is now a very fine literature on the early uptake of psychoanalysis in Great
Britain but this literature remains wedded to the idea of psychological enlightenment.
It follows the early lead of Bob Hinshelwood and Dean Rapp in identifying points of
cultural access for the new science. See R. D. Hinshelwood, “Psychoanalysis in Britain,
Points of Cultural Access, 1893–1918,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995),
135–151; Dean Rapp, “The Reception of Freud by the British Press, General Interest
and Literary Magazines, 1920–25,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24
(1988), 191–207; Dean Rapp, “The Early Doiscovery of Freud by the British General
Educated Public, 1912–1919,” Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), 217–243; Sandra
Ellesley, Psychoanalysis in Early Twentieth-Century England, a Study in the Popularization
of Ideas, University of Essex, PhD, 1995; Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “Tansley’s
Psychoanalytic Network, an Episode Out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in
England,” Psychoanalysis and History 2.2 (2000), 189–256; John Forrester, “Freud in
Cambridge,” Critical Quarterly 46.2 (2004), 1–26; George Makari, Revolution in Mind,
The Creation of Psycholanalysis (New York: Harper, 2008), chapters 9, 11; Susan Raitt,
“Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic,” HWJ 58 (2004),
64–85. Graham Richards, “Britain on the Couch, The Popularisation of Psychoanalysis
in Britain 1918–1940,” Science in Context 13.2 (2000), 183–230. For a striking excep-
tion, see Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects, Identity, Culture and Health in
Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
6. For example, Michael Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity, the “War
Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1970,” Journal of British Studies
44.2 (2005), 343–363.
7. For ideas of emergence in scientific practice, see Peter Galison, “Reflections on Image
and Logic, A Material Culture of Microphysics,” Perspectives on Science 7.2 (1999), 255–284;
Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things, Synthesizing Proteins in a
Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Andy Pickering, “The Mangle
of Practice, Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science,” American Journal
of Sociology 99.3 (1993), 559–589; “On Becoming, Imagination, Metaphysics and
the Mangle,” in Don Ihde and Evan Selinger, eds., Chasing Technoscience, Matrix for
Materiality (Bloomginton, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 96–116; “Science as
Alchemy,” in Joan Scott, Deborah Keates, and Clifford Geertz, eds., Schools of Thought,
Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 194–206; Gilles Deleuze, “What is a dispositif?” in T. J. Armstrong, ed., Michel
Foucault, Philosopher (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–168.
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Psychology Makes Itself True—or False,” in Sigmund Koch
and D. E. Leary, eds., A Century of Psychology as Science (Washington DC: American
Psychological Association, 1992), 897–903. For good accounts of this reflexive proc-
ess, see Roger Smith, “The History of Psychological Categories,” Studies in the History
and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2005), 55–94; Being Human,
Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007), 74–83; Graham Richards, Putting Psychology in its Place
(London: Routledge, 2002), chapter 1.
9. For illustrative studies of these particular categories, see Steven Brown, The Life of
Stress, The Saying and Seeing of Dysphoria, University of Reading PhD Thesis, 1997;
C. F. Goodey, A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disabilty” (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2011); Ian Hacking , Rewriting the Soul, Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
10. For the idea that emotion states are sustained by different language communities, see
Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997). For the significance of material change in creating new forms
of experience, see E. Thompson, “Folklore, Anthropology and Social History,” in
J. L. Noyce, ed., Studies in Labour History (Brighton: Noyce, 1979), 21.
11. Kurt Danziger, “When History, Theory and Philosophy Meet. The Biography of
Psychological Objects,” in D. B. Hill and M. J. Kral, eds., About Psychology, Essays at the
Crossroads of History, Theory and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2003), 19–34 See also K. Danziger, Naming the Mind (London: Sage, 1997), 186–193;
L. Daston, “Introduction, The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” in L. Daston,
ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–14.
12. Aubrey Lewis, “The Ambiguous Word ‘Anxiety,’” International Journal of Psychiatry
9 (1970), 61–79; Theodore Sarbin, “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, The Mythic
Nature of Anxiety,” American Psychologist 23.6 (1968), 411–418; German Berrios, The
History of Mental Symptoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264–273.
13. S. Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia
under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’ [1894/95],” in J. Strachey, ed., The Standard
Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE ) (London: The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1978), 92–99.
298 Rhodri Hayward
14. A. C. Oerlemans, Development of Freud’s Conception of Anxiety (Amsterdam:

North-Holland Publishing Co., 1949); James Strachey, “Editor’s Introduction,
Hemmung, Symptom, Angst,” in SE 20, 77–86.
15. Useful overviews, see Bartrip, Workmen’s Compensation in Twentieth-Century Britain
(Aldershot: Gower, 1987); E. Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and
Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); A. Wilson and H. Levy,
Workmen’s Compensation 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1939, 1941).
16. Hennock, Origin of the Welfare State, 115.
17. Ibid.; Wilson and Levy, Workmen’s Compensation, vol. 1 105–107.
18. Wilson and Levy, Workmen’s Compensation 1, 307–308; [ILO], International Survey of
Social Insurance, Geneva, ILO, 1936, 358; National Insurance Gazette (May 21, 1936),
322. Official returns only covered cases from the mining, shipping, docks, construc-
tion, factories, and railway industries; see Home Office, Workmen’s Compensation.
Statistics of Compensation and Proceedings under the Workmen’s Compensation Acts, and
the Employers’ Liability Act, 1880, in Great Britain during the Year 1929 [Cmd. 3781] House
of Commons Parliamentary Papers (H.C.) (1930–31) XXIX, 775.
19. Wilson and Levy, Compensation 2, 256–259; Hennock, Origin of the Welfare State, 118,
but see discussion in Bartrip, Compensation, 133–136.
20. By 1936, over six thousand compensation cases a year were being dealt with in the
courts (National Insurance Gazette [May 21, 1936], 322).
21. Ralph Harrington, “The Railway Accident, Trains, Traumas and Technological Crises
in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in M. Micale and Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts, History,
Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); “On the Tracks of Trauma, Railway Spine Reconsidered,” Social History of
Medicine 16.2 (2003), 209–223.
22. Victorian Railways v. Coultas [1888] A C. 222 (J.C.C); Dulieu v. White [1901] 2 K.B.
669; and Hambrook v. Stokes [1925] 1 K.B. 141. The best overview remains Hubert
Winston Smith, “Emotions to Injury and Disease, Legal Liability for Psychic Stimuli,”
Virginia Law Review 30.2 (1944), 193–317; see also Hubert Winston Smith and Harry
C. Solomon, “Traumatic Neuroses in Court,” Virginia Law Review 30.1 (1943), 87–175;
Danuta Mendelson, The Interfaces of Medicine and Law, The History of the Liability for
Negligently Caused Psychiatric Injury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
23. In the Matter of Arbitration between Etherington and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Accident
Insurance Company [1909] 1 KB591, 598 repr in John Lowry and Phillip Rawlings,
“Proximate Causation in Insurance Law,” Modern Law Review 68.2 (2005), 310–319;
Gilbert Stone and William Andrew Woods, Workmen’s Compensation and Insurance
Reports (London: Stevens and Co., 1933), 118.
24. [Editorial], “Malingering and the Workmen’s Compensation Act,” BMJ (June 24, 1911),
1473–1474; [Anon], “The Case of the Malingerer,” Lancet (February 1, 1913), 330; R. C. Buist,
“Medical Etiquette, Ethics and Politics,” BMJ (March 21, 1914), 642–643; A. Digby and
N. Bosanquet, “Doctors and Patients in an Era of National Health Insurance and Private
Practice, 1913–38,” Economic History Review 2nd series, XLI (1988), 79–94; Norman Eder,
“Medical Opinion and the First Year of National Health Insurance,” Albion 11 (1979),
157–171; National Health Insurance and the Medical Profession in Britain, 1913–1939 (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 45–47, 189–190.
25. Roger Cooter, “Malingering in Modernity, Psychological Scripts and Adversarial
Encounters during the First World War,” in Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve
Sturdy, eds., War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 125–148;
“The Moment of the Accident, Culture, Militarism and Modernity in Late Victorian
Britain,” in Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin, eds., Accidents in History, Injuries, Fatalities
and Social Relations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Mathew Thomson, [[NOTE MATHEW
NOT MATTHEW]]“Neurasthenia in Britain, An Overview,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra
and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia, From Beard to the First World War [Clio
Medica 63] (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 85–88; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male:
Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, (London: Reaktion, 1996), 79–84.
26. William Brown, “Psychology and Medicine,” in William Brown, ed., Psychology and
the Sciences (London: A. & C. Black, 1924), 145; “Mind, Doctor or Patient,” The Listener
(July 4, 1934), 35.
27. For these respective cases, see, Wellcome Library PP/FPW/B/211/3/1 Frederick Parkes
Weber Papers, Mind, Disease and Therapeutics (2nd Series); The National Archives
(TNA), Treasury, Establishment Department, Superannuation Division, Registered Files,
T164/74/15. For good coverage of psychological approaches in individual compensa-
tion cases, see, Karl Figlio, “How Does Illness Mediate Social Relations? Workmen’s
Compensation and Medico-Legal Practices, 1900–1940,” in Wright and A. Treacher,
eds., The Problem of Medical Knowledge (Edinburgh: University Press, 1982), 174–224;
Jo Melling, “Where did work stress come from? Scientific Research, Lay Experience and
the Culture of ‘Industrial Fear’ in the British workplace, c. 1890–1946,” in D. Cantor and
E. Ramsden, eds., Stress, Trauma and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, forthcoming).
28. R. A. Kaanan and S. Wessely, “The Origins of Factitious Disorder,” History of the Human
Sciences 23 (2010), 68–86.
29. Dyce Duckworth, “Discussion,” in Thomas Oliver, Some Medical and Insurance Problems
Arising Out of Recent Industrial Legislation (London: Life Assurance and Medical Officers
Association, 1909), 111.
30. Collie, “Malingering,” BMJ (September 13, 1913), 645. See also A. M’Kendrick,
Malingering and its Detection under the Workmen’s Compensation and other Acts (Edinburgh,
E. &. S. Livingstone, 1912), 25–26; W. H. Brook, “On the Working of the Workmen’s
Compensation Act of 1906,” BMJ (July 16, 1910), 133–135, on 134; A. Murri, “Traumatic
Neuroses,” Universal Medical Record 2 (August 1912), 97–116; J. W. Geary Grant, “The
Traumatic Neuroses,” The Practitioner XCIII (July 1914), 26–43, esp 42–43, on the inter-
mixing of hysteria and malingering.
31. William Thorburn, “Presidential Address, The Traumatic Neuroses,” Proc. RSM 7 (1914)
[Section of Neurology], 12.
32. Ibid.
33. Lumsden, “The Psychology of Malingering and Functional Neuroses in Peace and
War,” Lancet (November 18, 1916), 861. See also T. Muirhead Martin, “Malingering and
National Insurance,” Clinical Journal 43.1 (1914), 14–16; F. Palmer, “Traumatic Neuroses
and Psychoses,” Practitioner 86 (1911), 808–820.
34. A. Bassett Jones and L. J. Llewellyn, Malingering or the Simulation of Disease (London:
Heinemann, 1917), 64; E. F. Buzzard “The Psychology of Traumatic Amblyopia,”
Proc. RSM 8 [Neurological Section] (1915), 66. On military pensions, see Peter Leese,
“Problems Returning Home, The British Psychological Casualties of the Great War,”
Historical Journal 40 (1997), 1061, 1063; Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, 298–308, 352–354.
On the relationship between psychological models and workmen’s compensation, see
Figlio, “Workmen’s Compensation and Medico-Legal Practices,” esp. 194–195.
35. For the role of anxiety in shaping medical investigations of shell-shock cases, see
G. Elliott-Smith and T. H. Pear, Shellshock and its Lessons 4th ed. (London: Longman
Green, 1919). For Bernard Hart’s evidence to the Southborough Committee, see [Great
Britain, War Office], Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock”
(London: HMSO, 1922), 76–80; E. F. Buzzard, “Psycho-therapuetics,” Lancet (February
17, 1923), 331–332.
36. The main point of reference for the debate over the psychologization of compensation
occurred in the MRC investigations into miners’ nystagmus. Psychologists working for
the Industrial Health Research Board argued that small injuries were aggravated by the
unconscious desire for award; see Millais Culpin, “The Problem of the Neurasthenic
Pensioner,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 10 (1921), 316–328; “A Study of the
Incidence of the Minor Psychoses, Their Clinical and Industrial Importance,” Lancet
(1928), 220–224; “Nervous Disease and its Significance in Industry,” Medical Standard
52 (1929), 9–14; “The Need for Psychopathology,” Lancet (October 4, 1930), 725; “Some
Cases of ‘Traumatic Neurasthenia,’” Lancet (January 10, 1931), 233–237, also editorial
300 Rhodri Hayward
“The Psychology of Accident Neuroses,” Lancet (January 10, 1931), 87; “The Nervous
Temperament, its Assessment and its Clinical Aspect,” British Journal of Medical
Psychology 11 (1931), 32–39; Recent Advances in the Study of Psychoneuroses (London:
Churchill, 1931), 192–200. See also T. A. Ross, “Some Evils of Compensation,” Mental
Hygiene 3.4 (1937), 141–145; “Heart and Mind,” in C. M. Bevan Brown, G. E. S. Ward,
and F. G. Crookshank, eds., Individual Psychology Theory and Practice [I. Pamphlet no, 15]
(London: C. W. Daniel, 1936), 46.
37. J. M. Bannatyne (Harland and Wolf), in [Holman Gregory] Departmental Committee on
Workmen’s Compensation Minutes of Evidence vol. I [Cmd. 908] H. C. 1920, XXVI, 291,
§7132. See also [Holman Gregory], Departmental Committee on Workmen’s Compensation
Minutes of Evidence vol. II [Cmd. 909] H. C. 1920, XXVI, 304, § 20123 (Memorandum
George Cranston Anderson).
38. [William Stewart] Report by the Departmental Committee on Certain questions arising
under the Workmen’s Compensations Acts [Cmd 5657] H. C. (1937–38) XV, 25, § 67. See
also 10 (§23), 24 (§64).
39. Stewart, Report, 6, §. 11.; 90, § 195. Holman Gregory, Minutes, § 3792, 5427, 5427; 6230,
6275, 6356; 6613, 7132, 8373; 11, 583.
40. The National Archives TNA PIN 15/2401 Neurasthenia and psychoses, treatment and
entitlement to pension, committee’s report (1939); Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of
the Great War (London: Yale University, 2004), 375.
41. Ian Skottowe, “The Psychiatric Out-Patient Clinic,” BMJ (March 14, 1931), 452–453;
Doris Odlum, “The Organization and Staffing of Out-Patient Mental Treatment Clinics,”
Mental Hygiene 5 (1939), 57–60; Charles Stanford Read, “Out-Patient Psychiatry,” Lancet
221 (1931), 1438–1441; J. R. Rees, “Psychotherapeutic Clinics,” in M. Culpin, ed., Recent
Advances in the Study of Psychoneuroses (London: Churchill, 1931), 310–329; C. Blacker,
Neurosis in the Mental Health Services (Oxford: Medical Publications, 1946), 5.
42. C. Blacker, “A Patient’s Dreams as an Index of his Inner Life,” Guy’s Hospital Reports
78.2 (April 1928), 219–245;, Human Values in Psychological Medicine (Oxford: Oxford
Medical Publications, 1932); Stephen Taylor, “The Suburban Neurosis,” Lancet (March
26, 1938), 759–761.
43. Thomson, “Neurasthenia in Britain,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter,
eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia, From Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2002), 88.
44. HRH Prince George, “The Place of Mental Health in the Life of the Nation,” Mental
Health (1934), 6–7.
45. On the changing pattern of neurosis, see J. L. Halliday, Psychosocial Medicine, A Study
of the Sick Society (London: Heinemann, 1949), 126; J. A. C. Brown, Freud and the
Post-Freudians (London: Penguin, 1961), 61–62.
46. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1942), 57, quoted in John Hewetson, Ill
Health, Poverty and the State (London: Freedom Press, 1946), 13.
47. C. E. S. Flemming, “Disappearing Diseases,” BMJ (February 20, 1926), 321; J. Campbell,
“Psychology and the Practice of Medicine,” BMJ (March 29, 1931), 611.
48. Kinnier Wilson, “The Approach to the Study of Hysteria,” J. Neurology and Pathology 11
(1931), 195.
49. W. H. R. Rivers, “War Neurosis and Military Training,” Mental Hygiene 2.4 (1918),
513–553, rept.. Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1920), 205–227; Henry Head in Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into
Shellshock (London: HMSO, 1922), 68–69; Eric Leed, No Man’s Land, Combat and
Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 163–164, but
see the revisionist accounts by Tracy Loughran, “Hysteria and Neurasthenia in Pre-1914
British Medical Discourse,” History of Psychiatry 19 (2008), 25–46; and Simon Wessely
and Edgar Jones, “Hearts, Guts and Minds, Somatization in the British Military,”
J. Psychosomatic Research 56 (2004), 524–529 on changing patterns of embodiment.
50. J. A. Hadfield, “War Neurosis, a Year in a Neuropathic Hospital,” BMJ, British Medical
Journal Part 1 (1942), 281–285; 320–323; Editorial, BMJ 1 (1945), 913; M. Culpin,
“Clinical Psychology, Some Forgotten Episodes,” BMJ (December 1, 1952), 955–958;

J. Rickman, “A Case of Hysteria, Theory and Practice in the Two Wars,” Lancet (June 21,
1941), 785–786; J. R. Neill, “How Psychiatric Symptoms Varied in World War I and II,”
Military Medicine (1993), 149–151.
51. On the expanding category of the psychosomatic, see E. Wittkower, “Studies of the
Influence of the Emotions on the Functions of the Organs,” Journal of Mental Science
81 (1935), 533–682; F. Dunbar, Emotions and Bodily Changes (New York: Columbia
University Press [1935], 1954). For an overview, see M. Jackson, The Age of Stress, Science
and the Search for Stability (Oxford: University Press, forthcoming).
52. J. L. Halliday, Psycho-Social Medicine (London: William Heinemann Medical Books,
1949), 61–66; “The Incidence of Psychosomatic Affections in Britain,” Psychosomatic
Medicine 8 (1945): 135–146.
53. John MacMurray, “A Philosopher Looks at Psychotherapy,” Individual Psychology
Medical Pamphlets no. 20 (1938), 21; J. A. Hadfield, “Anxiety States,” British Journal of
Medical Psychology 9 (1929), 33–37; Arthur Harris, “The Prognosis of Anxiety States,”
BMJ (September 24, 1938), 649.
54. Nick Lee and Steven D. Brown, “The Disposal of Fear, Childhood, Trauma and
Complexity,” in John Law and Annemarie Mol, eds., Complexities, Social Studies of
Scientific Knowledge (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2002), 258–279.
55. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire, On the Epistemology of
Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 229–238.
56. J. L. Halliday, “Psychoneuroses as a Cause for Incapacity among Insured Persons,”
BMJ Su (March 9, 1935), 85–88; BMJ Su (March 16, 1935), 99–102; M. Cassidy, “The
Treatment of Cardiac Cases,” BMJ (January 13, 1934), 45–47. T. A. Ross, “The Mental
Factors in Medicine,” BMJ (July 30, 1938), 209–211; see also “Mental Factors in Illness,”
Times (August 22, 1938), 11c. For other follow-up studies, see Harris, “The Prognosis,”
649–654; “Treatment of Neurosis, Neurotic Insured Persons,” National Insurance
Gazette (January 9, 1936), 28; Henry Brackenbury, “Election Address,” National
Insurance Gazette (March 11, 1937), 156. For lower estimates, see D. Bruce Pearson,
“Psycho-Neuroses in Hospital Practice,” Lancet (February 19, 1938), 451–456; R. D.
Gillespie, “Psychoneurosis and Psychotherapy,” in Humphrey Rolleston, ed., British
Encyclopedia of Medical Practice 10 (London: Butterworth & Co., 1938), 248.
57. Warwick MRC, MSS 292/140.1/2 [J. W. Yerrell], National Association of Trade Union
Approved Societies, Memorandum on Nervous Diseases, 1937; NUDAW Approved Society
24th Annual Report for the Year ended December 31, 1936, in National Insurance
Gazette (25/2/37), 116–117 on 17.
58. William Leonard, Report to the Minister of Health, H. C. Deb (December 19, 1934)
vol. 296, cc1175–286; [Duke of Kent], Institute for Medical Psychology Report for the
Year 1933 (London: [Tavistock Clinic, 1934]), 3; A. M. Spencer, “Psychotherapy and
National Health Insurance,” Lancet (June 10, 1939) rept. Mental Hygiene 5.3 (1939), 7.
59. J. L. Halliday, “The Incidence of Psychosomatic Affections in Britain,” Psychosomatic
Medicine 7 (1945), 135–145; “Epidemiology and the Psychosomatic Affections,” Lancet
(August 19, 1946), 185–186; Psychosocial Medicine, A Study of the Sick Society (London:
William Heinemann Medical Books, 1949).
60. Rhodri Hayward, “Enduring Emotions, James L. Halliday and the Invention of the
Psychosocial,” Isis 100 (2009), 827–838.
61. “The Birth Rate and Insurance,” Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor (December 19,
1936), 2393; “Vital Statistics,” The Insurance Record (December 1937), 360; Ann Oakley,
“Eugenics, Social Medicine and the Changing Pattern of Statistics in Britain, 1935–50,”
British J. Sociology 42 (1991), 165–194.
62. Richard Titmuss, Poverty and Population (London: Macmillan, 1938), 202–204; Richard
and Kathleen Titmuss, The Parent’s Revolt, A Study of the Birth Rate in Acquisitive Societies
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1942), 16–18.
63. J. N. Morris and Richard M. Titmuss, “Epidemiology of Peptic Ulcer, Vital Statistics,”
Lancet (December 30, 1944), 845.
302 Rhodri Hayward
64. Ken Fuller, Radical Aristocrats, London Busworkers from the 1890s to the 1980s (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 143–159; Pete Glatter, “London Busmen, Rise and Fall of
a Rank and File Movement,” International Socialism 74 (January 1975), 5–11.
65. For accounts of the illness, see [John Langdon Davies], “Strange Illness of Bus
Conductors,” News Chronicle (December 2, 1936), 3; [William Payne], London Busmen
Demand the Right to Live a Little Longer (London: London Busmen’s Rank and File
Movement, 1937); “Busmen’s Wives Tell, The Heavy Toll of a Driver’s Job,” Reynolds
News (May 2, 1937), 5; “Stomach Pains through Motoring,” Reynolds News (May 16,
1937), 6.
66. H. Llewellyn Smith et. al., The New Survey of London Life and Labour vol. VII (London
Industries III, London, S. King & Son, 1934), 87; A. Bradford Hill, An Investigation
into the Sickness Experience of London Transport Workers in Special Reference to Digestive
Disturbances [IHRB Report no. 79] (London: HMSO, 1937).
67. TNA FD1/4082 David Munro to Ambrose Woodall (November 20, 1936)
68. [Ministry of Labour] Industrial Courts Act, 1919. Report of a Court of Inquiry concerning
the Stoppage of the London Central Omnibus Service. Cmnd. 5464 (London: HMSO, 1937);
TNA Lab 10/54 Report of a Court of Inquiry; [Ministry of Labour], The Effect of Working
Conditions upon the Health of London Busmen, Report of Conferences between Representatives
of the London Passenger Transport Board, the Transport and General Workers Union and
the Medical Research Council under the chairmanship of Sir John Forster (London: HMSO,
1939); TNA Lab 10/536 Report of an inquiry by Sir John Forster under the Conciliation
Acts 1896 into a dispute between certain trade unions and omnibus undertakings;
“The Health of London Busmen,” BMJ (November 18, 1939), 1003–1004.
69. See “A Test of Public Duty,” Times (May 7, 1937), 7c; “Mr Bevin Presents the Busmen’s
Case,” Guardian (May 4, 1937), 4; “London Busmen’s Grievances,” Guardian (May 5,
1937), 14.
70. E. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” Past and Present 50.1 (1971),
76–136.
71. E. G. Winslow, “Keynes and Freud, Psychoanalysis and Keynes Account of the ‘Animal
Spirits of Capitalism,’” Social Research 53 (1986), 549–578.
72. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), in CW7,
161–162.
73. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics [1890] (London: Macmillan, 1945), 1.
74. Millais Culpin, “The Need for Psychopathology,” Lancet 219 (1930), 725.
75. [Medical Research Council], Third Report of the Miners’ Nystagmus Committee
(London: HMSO, 1932); E. Dickson, “The Morbid Miner,” Edinburgh Medical Journal 43
(1936), 696–705; R. S. Brock, “A Study of Miner’s Nystagmus,” BMJ (February 26, 1938),
443–444.
76. Wootton, Lament for Economics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), 42, 43–44.
77. Wootton, Freedom under Planning (London, Allen and Unwin, 1945), 24–25.
78. On Durbin (1906–1948), see Elizabeth, Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and
the Economics of Democratic Socialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), esp.
chapters 11 and 13; Stephen Brooke, “Problems of Socialist Planning,” Evan Durbin
and the Labour Government of 1945,” The Historical Journal 34.3 (1991), 687–702.;
Stephen Brooke, “Evan Durbin, Reassessing a Labour ‘Revisionist,’” Twentieth Century
British History 7 (1996), 27–52; J. Nuttall, “‘Psychological Socialist,’ ‘Militant Moderate’
Evan Durbin and the Politics of Democratic Synthesis,” Labour History Review 68.2
(2003), 235–252; Psychological Socialism. The Labour Party and the Qualities of Mind and
Character (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 49–54.
79. E. F. M. Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism, An Essay in Social Policy (London:
George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1945), 331; (George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1942),
95–96.
80. Ben Mayhew, “Between Love and Aggression, the Politics of John Bowlby,” History of
the Human Sciences 19.4 (2006), 19–35; Hugh Gaitskell, “At Oxford in the Twenties,” in
A. Briggs and J. Saville, eds., Essays in Labour History (London: Macmillan, 1967), 6–19.
81. Personal Aggressiveness and War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937).
82. Durbin, Politics, 71.
83. Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992); R. Mackay, Half the Battle, Civilian
Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002); Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven, Bill Durodie, and Simon Wessely, “Civilian Morale
during the Second World War, Responses to Air Raid Re-examined,” Social History of
Medicine 17.3 (2004), 463–479.
84. Battle for Health, A Primer of Social Medicine (London: Nicholoson and Watson [1944]),
122–124 c.f Taylor, MUN Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Stephen Taylor 5.04.008,
Labour Party Policy, A White Paper for a Post War World [An unofficial but authoritative
statement of Labour’s proposal for reconstruction], 2, 24; Wilson Jameson, “Industry’s
Contribution to Positive Health,” in Ministry of Labour Conference on Industrial Health
(London: HMSO, 1943), 22–26.
85. See references to anxiety and neurosis in the debates on the foundation of the health
service, HC Deb, June 12, 1945 vol 411 c. 1527 (J. Griffiths), 1537 (J. Boyd-Orr), 1575
(R. McIntyre; H. Morgan); national insurance, HC Deb, October 10, 1945 vol 414
c. 329 (S. Taylor). On the overall need for security, Michael Young, Labour’s Plan for
Plenty (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), 101–120.
86. For an overview, see Stephen Fielding, “‘To make men and women better than they
are?’ Labour and the Building of Socialism in the 1940s,” in J. Fyrth, ed., Labour’s
Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain, 1945–51 (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1995), 16–25.
87. Aneurin Bevan, 104th Meeting of the RMPA, 1946, JMS Supp (January 1946), 15–16,
rept in C. Webster, ed., Aneurin Bevan on the National Health Service (Oxford: WUHOM,
1991), 19.
88. A. Bevan, In Place of Fear (London: William Heinemann, 1952), 37–38.
89. On the shift, see Martin Daunton, “Payment and Participation, Welfare and State
Formation in Britain, 1900–1951,” Past and Present 150 (1996), 208–212; Jose Harris,
“Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940, An Intellectual Framework for
British Social Policy,” Past and Present 135 (1992), 116–141; Steven Fielding, “Labourism
in the 1940s,” Twentieth Century British History 3 (1992), 138–153.
90. For attitudes to psychology in the Atlee government, see Martin Francis, “Economics
and Ethics, the Nature of Labour’s Socialism,” Journal of Contemporary British History 6.2
(1995), 220–243, esp. 235–241; Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson, Industrial Efficiency
and State Intervention, Labour 1939–51 (London, Routledge, 1993), chapter 5.
91. Tavistock workers enjoyed close relationships with leading members of the Labour
Party. Alongside Bowlby and Durbin’s friendship, Eliot Jacques was close to Stafford
Cripps and A. T. M. Wilson with Max Nicholson, PPS to Herbert Morrison. Margaret
Cole remained on the Board of the Clinic from 1935. On these relationships, see
Rockefeller Archive Center RF 1.1 401A Box 27 Folder 349.
92. Margaret Cole, “Introduction” and Durbin “Response to Bowlby” in Conference on
Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism, BLPES Durbin Papers
4/8 Notes on Social Psychology. Quotation on 5.
93. John Bowlby [Light thrown by Modern Psychology on the Present Problems of Social
Development] in Wellcome CMAC PP/Bow/F.3/1; “Psychology and Democracy,”
Political Quarterly 17 (1946), 61–77, quotation, 67.
94. Wellcome CMAC PP/BOW/A6/1 Proposals for Socio-Psychological Research (Evan
Durbin to Herbert Morrison, April 15, 1946)
95. [Royal College of Physicians, British Medical Association and the Royal
Medico-Psychological Association], Memorandum on the Future Organisation of
the Psychiatric Services [1945] rept BMJ Su (June 16, 1945), 111–116, on 111; D. R.
Macalaman, “The Development of Psychiatry within the NHS,” Proc.RSM 42 (1949),
365–366; Desmond Curran, “Psychiatry Limited,” JMS 98 (1952), 373–381; F. A. E.
Crew, “Opportunity for Adventure,” Lancet (August 27, 1949), 357–358.
96. A. C. Oerlemans, Freud’s Conception of Anxiety, 117.
304 Rhodri Hayward
97. Majorie Brierley, “Notes on Psycho-Analysis and Integrative Living,” International

Journal of Psycho-Analysis 28 (1947), 57–105; W. Hollitscher, “On the Concepts of
Psychological Health and Illness,” IJPsA 24 (1943), 125; R. E. Money-Kyrle, “Some
Aspect of Political Ethics from the Psycho-Analytic Point of View,” IJPsA 25 (1944),
166–171; Gregory Zilboorg, “Sociology and the Psychoanalytic Method,” American
Journal of Sociology 45 (1939), 341A; W. Wolters, “The Concept of Mental Maturity,”
Nature 156 (1945), 494–96. For neurology, see Roger Smith, “Biology and Values in
Interwar Britain, C. S. Sherrington, Julian Huxley and the Vision of Progress,” Past and
Present 178 (2003), 210–242.
98. A. V. Horwitz, “How an Age of Anxiety Became an Age of Depression,” The Milbank
Quarterly 88 (2010).
99. Mikkel Borch Jacobsen, “Psychotropicana,” LRB 24.13 (July 11, 2002), 17–18, rept
Making Minds and Madness, the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), chapter 11; Peter Tyrer and Edward Shorter, “separation of Anxiety and
Depressive Disorders, Blind Alley in Psychopharmocology and the Classification of
Disease,” BMJ (July 18, 2003), 158–160.
100. Eric Brunner and Michael Marmot, “Social Organization, Stress and Health,” in
M. Marmot and R. G. Wilkinson, eds., Social Determinants of Health (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), chapter 2; Eric Brunner “Stress and the Biology of Inequality,”
BMJ 314 (1997), 1472–1477; Paul Gilbert, “Evolution and Depression, Issues and
Implications,” Psychological Medicine 36 (2006), 287–297.
101. See the interesting points made by Richard A. A. Kanaan and Simon C. Wessely on the
end of patient patronage and the break up of the category of hysteria, “The Origins of
Factitious Disorder,” History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010), 74, 80.
15
An Eclectic Ego-Histoire
Luisa Passerini
My interest in psychoanalysis dates from the mid-1960s, when as a member

of a very small pro-Situationist group in Turin and Milan, I was part of the
still disjointed movement of the Italian radical left. My original interest was
theoretical and political, in the sense that I strongly believed—following the
philosophy of the Frankfurt school—that the present situation of the world,
and strategies to change it, had to be understood at both a social and indi-
vidual level, incorporating the public and the private, the political and the
personal: adopting a Marxian analysis for the dynamics of material produc-
tion and a Freudian one for the dialectics of the libido and the psyche. I read
systematically and with total assent the philosophy of Max Horkheimer and
the Frankfurt School, but I was not convinced by The Authoritarian Personality
(published in Italy in 1973 and signed among others by Theodor Adorno),
and I was disturbed by what I considered were mechanistic efforts to combine
Marxism and psychoanalysis.1
In the late 1960s and early 1970s I read a good deal of and about Freud and
Freudian authors such as Elvio Fachinelli and Cesare Musatti.2 I devoured
books like Hilda Doolittle’s story of her analysis with Freud and Lou
Andreas-Salomé’s diaries on the same.3 I was captivated by texts that tried to
join the political critique of society and family life with psychoanalysis, such
as David Cooper’s and Ronald D. Laing’s.4 In Laing’s The Divided Self my fel-
low radicals and I found confirmation of one of the widespread convictions
of the movement—that there is no insurmountable gap between the men-
tally ill and “normal” people (one of the slogans of the student movement
in Turin in 1968–69, when demonstrating against the treatment of internees
in mental asylums, was “Il potere è matto”—”Power is Crazy”). The theme of
antipsychiatry was very present in Italy thanks to the involvement of Franco
Basaglia, who inspired the law that abolished mental asylums in 1978.5
Basaglia and his wife Franca Ongaro had written the introduction to another
305
306 Luisa Passerini
book that was important to us in those years, Asylums by Erving Goffman, on

the practices of exclusion and violence in total institutions.6
However, I was also very interested in works that presented revisions of
Freudian approach, such as Heinz Kohut’s on narcissism and later John
Bowlby’s on affectional bonds.7 These books posed in challenging ways one of
the questions in which I was most interested, about the formation and devel-
opment of children, a theme that was also central to some of the feminist
writers of the time, such as Shulamith Firestone and Elena Gianini Belotti.8
These readings were circulated and discussed in networks of friends that
were part of the radical left in Italy, but our interest in them was existential
rather than therapeutic. In the “mixed”9 political groups of the late 1960s to
early 1970s, it was unthinkable that any of us should enter psychoanalytic
treatment. Even in 1984, when I started a psychoanalysis, a good friend of
mine, a leftist intellectual, remarked that I did not “need” it. A decade earlier,
when many of us had put an end to our political activity in leftwing groups
(in my case this meant becoming more active in the feminist movement and
later on in the school trade unions—since I was teaching in a high school at
the time), some of us had gone to the Freudian psychoanalyst Fachinelli in
Milan to express our feeling of loss following the interruption of our politi-
cal activity. His diagnosis was that ours was not a call for psychoanalytic
treatment, but a symptom of the social and political crisis through which we
were living, and he started a discussion group that met at his house in Milan
a few times. At that time (mid-1970s), I was living through and shared up to
a point the criticisms made of psychoanalysis by the feminist movement, as
well as wondering about its possible uses. In the 1970s, psychoanalysis was
practiced by some feminist groups in a “wild” form (following the example
of the French group Psychoanalyse et Politique of Lacanian inspiration) among
women critical of the masculinist approach of Freud and other psychoana-
lysts.10 I did not agree with this, and I felt encouraged in my critical position
by what was for me a crucial text at the time, Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis
and Feminism, her feminist analysis of Freud, Reich, and Laing.11
However, there had always been a pragmatic side of my—and my friends’—
interest in psychoanalysis, having to do with the body/psyche connection,
particularly with regard to sexuality but also in relation to health issues and
radical critiques of Western medicine. The psychosomatic approach was
largely functional to encourage and support our practice of sexual freedom.
Under the impulse of the so-called sexual liberation movement I read a lot
of Wilhelm Reich12 —whose ideas about the liberating function of orgasm
seemed completely convincing—and I was fascinated by Georg Groddeck,
whose practice as a medical doctor promised healing to all sorts of illness.13
However, like all utopias, the promise of a psychosomatic self-healing offered
by these thinkers proved in the end largely a failure, at least if their methods
were understood in a literal sense.
All of this was seen, by my fellow radicals and me, as part of the struggle
against the bourgeois world and its moral code, which rested on the family
and the heterosexual couple, with its obsession on jealousy. Both Reich and
An Eclectic Ego-Histoire 307
Groddeck were very influential not only because they had been in close con-
tact with Freud, but also because their works offered a materialistic basis to
our desire for changing everyday life, a central point of Situationist—but not
only—beliefs. Moreover, Reich was a tragic figure, having been arrested in
the United States by the FBI and imprisoned first in a mental asylum and then
in a federal penitentiary, where he died in 1957. His notion of “the sexual
struggle of youth,” which in 1933 had stirred the attack against him from
the Nazis, was still meaningful to us.14 So was his idea of breaking the “body
armour” and putting human beings in touch with cosmic energy. I think now
that there were tendencies toward esotericism as well as sort of miraculous
utopianism in our materialistic beliefs, as there was a utopian element to our
ideas about social and political change. However, I also read and discussed
with my friends Michael Bálint and Sándor Ferenczi on the critique of genital
sexuality and the importance of preliminary pleasure in the sexual act.15 I
remember that their writings were connected with discussions in feminist
consciousness-raising groups about eroticism and sexuality (I believe that I
presented on one of these occasions a table drawn up by Bálint comparing the
characteristics of “preliminary pleasure,” which extended to the whole body,
with those of genital “final pleasure” culminating in orgasm). Another crucial
point was the relationship between sexuality and the maternal body, on the
basis not only of Bálint’s idea of the primary love object, but also of Ferenczi’s
suggestion of a symbolic analogy between the maternal body and the sea.
These two authors seemed to us less male-oriented than Reich and Groddeck
and closer to our own preoccupations. I remember vividly a conference on
“Sexuality and Politics” held in Milan in 1975, in which some of the ten-
sions emerged between feminist militants and other participants, including
David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Armando Bauleo, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva,
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Philippe Sollers, Elvio Fachinelli, and Maurice
Godelier.16 Part of the audience protested loudly against the language used
by the “specialists” and the “stars,” claiming that their own experience as
women, lesbians, and homosexuals was being “used,” instrumentalized and
distorted.
This cultural-political atmosphere changed drastically in the second half
of the 1970s, when the political activity of radical left groups came to an
end, and Italian feminism dwindled gradually from a popular movement
into groups devoted to specific activities, among which cultural initiatives
were prominent. Terrorism—both “black” or neofascist, and “red,” referring
to the anarchist and communist traditions—which had begun in 1969 with
the massacre at the Banca dell’Agricoltura in Milan (a bomb was exploded in
this bank on December 12, 1969, killing 16 people and wounding 88), had
become more and more dominant on the public scene. The climax of this
process, the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in
Rome in May 1978, was the confirmation that times had completely changed
and there was no longer any space for radical left politics. The only form of
political engagement that now seemed possible was to transfer some of the
ideas that originated in the political realm into the cultural and intellectual
308 Luisa Passerini
domain. However, the combination of politics and culture specific to Italian

political experience from Gramsci to the 1960s and 1970s, included the insist-
ence on the relevance of subjectivity for political theory and practice, which
continued in the following decades.17
* * *
These readings and reflections on the psyche and politics were in the back of
my mind when I started doing oral history, in the second half of the 1970s,
and whatever sediment they left had a decisive impact on my work in that
field. Having decided to bring subjectivity into history, I had no doubt that
this had to include the unconscious, although it was not clear exactly what
this meant.18 I was determined to bring three elements into the study of mem-
ory: a political concept of subjectivity understood as the capacity of students,
workers, and women (the three movements I had been part of) to be subjects
of their own lives and of history, in the realms of agency and thought, imagi-
nation and emotion; the psychoanalytic notion of a complex multilayered
subjectivity, with conscious, unconscious and subconscious, or preconscious
levels, a version of subjectivity that I felt had been denied to the subaltern
classes and oppressed groups; and subjectivity as seen from the vantage point
of historical anthropology, which I had been exploring in relation to the
African liberation movements and the Italian antifascist movements, with
its combination of diachronic changes over time and the synchronic web of
relationships established by individuals in their social interactions. This third
historical-anthropological element is not considered in this chapter, which
focuses rather on the first two elements.19
My first foray into oral history, in 1975–76, involved the collection and
study of the memories of factory workers in Turin who had lived through the
Fascist period. I had no idea how to combine the theoretical elements men-
tioned earlier with the historical analysis of memory. I had interviewed about
70 workers born between 1884 and 1922, at first with very general questions
to elicit narratives about their life stories, followed by more detailed questions
on their experience of Fascism. I was struck by the apparent irrelevance of
the testimonies I collected to the accepted histories of Fascism, which did not
deal with subjective experience of the regime. As I reported at the time, my
first impression was to have “received what to my ears were either irrelevant
or inconsistent answers”: silences, anecdotes and jokes, and often discrep-
ancies with the existing historiography of the Fascist period.20 Eventually
all this turned into a confirmation of the value of a Freudian approach to
memory, as I will try to show.
However, in the book that emerged from that research ten years later,
Fascism in Popular Memory, the only references to Freud are to Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious.21 Of course, this was very significant, because a
crucial point of my work—and I dare say a turning point in the analysis of the
memory of Fascism—was to consider the insistent recurrence of jokes in dis-
cussions about the regime. I interpreted such recurrence not only as a way of
avoiding embarrassing questions about the joker’s involvement with Fascism,

but also as an ambiguous form of cultural resistance—a complex mixture of
acceptance and dissent vis-à-vis the dictatorship. From the methodological
point of view, taking seriously the recurrence of jokes in oral testimonies was
a way of introducing the unconscious into historical discourse, using Freud’s
argument about the roots of laughter in compromise and his observations
that comic forms originate from inhibitions overcome without any apparent
effort.22 From this perspective, jokes in the context of Italian Fascism were a
temporary release from social norms regulating daily speech in an authoritar-
ian regime. What Freud called the joke-work or joke-technique, which “can be
described as ‘condensation accompanied by the formation of a substitute,”’23
could be seen operating in these jokes, which brought together the figure of
Mussolini and the lower parts of the body in a Bakhtinian sense. Bakhtin
was crucial in understanding that in this way the low was celebrated against
the high, and the image of power was lowered and ridiculed.24 Similarly, the
joke-work could be seen working through puns, which completely reversed
the meaning of Fascist slogans.
Still, important as it was for establishing the working class’s ambivalent
attitude toward the regime (rather than simple consensus, as the conservative
historiography claimed, or straightforward dissent, as the anti-Fascist histo-
rians maintained), this analysis of joking was only part of psychoanalysis’s
contribution to the study of the memory of Fascism. The most important part
of this contribution was not immediately visible, in the best psychoanalytical
tradition. I will now try to make it more visible, if I am allowed an exercise
in afterthought, based not on my own memory, but on the combination of a
double rereading: of the books that I read at the time and of my own texts.
Freud’s most important “discovery” is of course the unconscious,25 although
it would be more precise to say that he reformulated a concept already in
existence.26 The main contribution of psychoanalysis to historical studies, in
my view, has been to make subjectivity—including its unconscious dimen-
sion and its internal fissures—into an object of history, and in particular to
make memory itself analyzable as a form of subjectivity.
In Freud, the principle of displacement is crucial for understanding how
memory operates, since the fundamental work of psychoanalysis is done
through free association, which exposes the relation between conscious
and unconscious levels of the psyche. The principle of association makes
it possible to move from conscious memories to their repressed correlates
and—through psychoanalytic therapy—to change the relation between
them. Association and displacement are processes that can be seen at work
in what Freud describes as screen-memory. According to his 1899 essay on
screen-memory, usually our memories of childhood consist only of “a rela-
tively small number of isolated recollections which are often of dubious or
enigmatic importance.”27 This limited repertoire of conscious recollections
is very like what the oral historian receives when the interviewee replies to
her question “tell me the history of your life,” that is, seemingly irrelevant
stories and anecdotes. The oral historian, like Freud before her, notices that
310 Luisa Passerini
“quite special interest attaches to the question of what is the usual content of
these earliest memories of childhood,” a content that is often recollected in
an extremely detailed way “(too clearly, one is inclined to say)” in spite of its
apparent lack of significance.28 The extreme detail is due to the overcharging
of what is remembered with what is not.
At this point, however, the procedures of the historian and that of the psy-
choanalyst diverge: the latter diagnoses a conflict between “two psychical
forces,” one that “takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seek-
ing to remember it, while the other—a resistance—tries to prevent any such
preference for being shown.”29 The conflict produces an associative displace-
ment whereby one psychical content is substituted for another. Therefore the
memory “owes its value not to its own content but to the relation existing
between that content and some other, that has been suppressed.”30 Similarly,
one could say that a symbolic reading of interviews is one that exposes the
relation between a conscious memory and that which is “omitted” from it;
Freud again: “I should prefer to speak of these elements of the experience
being omitted rather than forgotten.”31
Thus many passages by Freud are translatable into the practice of interpre-
tation in oral history. Nonetheless, it is very important to maintain the dis-
tinction between the two disciplines. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, in
Freud the content of the screen-memory is connected with other later impres-
sions or ideas by symbolic links—an observation that could well apply to
oral testimonies.32 However, in psychoanalysis, such memories “represent the
forgotten years of childhood as adequately as the manifest content of a dream
represents the dream-thoughts,” which means, conversely, that the essence of
the dream-thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all.33 In other
words, in this context they are closely connected with the unconscious.
Therefore, it must be clear that I am talking of a transposition34 from the
text of Freud to my interpretation, which is a simplified and metaphorical
application of his theories to the field of oral history. In listening to my inter-
viewees narrate anecdotes about their childhoods, it often seemed to me that a
displacement from the literal to the metaphorical or symbolic meaning of the
anecdotes was necessary for me to understand these stories—or, in Freudian
terms, to “take up the defence of [the memory’s] genuineness.”35 To put it
another way, I was sure that the memories were genuinely significant at some
level, although probably not at the literal one. But of course I could not repeat
Freud’s analytic procedure, in which he followed the displacement from the
screen-memory to the repressed memory, through free associations on the
part of the analysand, mediated by the transference and countertransference:
interpretive processes not available to me. My method involved tracing a dif-
ferent sort of displacement, from the childhood memory to an individual
and collective cultural identity, which could well have preconscious or even
unconscious roots. I could not help noticing that such identities were often
informed, in the case of the testimonies presented to me, by long-established
folkloric representations. Thus, for instance, the anecdote told to me by an
old woman describing her intractability as a child offered up an image of
rebellion that contrasted sharply to other parts of her testimony depicting

her as a good mother, wife, and worker. This symbolic identity, I argued in
Fascism in Popular Memory —while in tension with the experiential sections
of the interview—was consistent with a centuries-old tradition of “woman
on top,” a potentially subversive invocation of feminine insubordination.36
Support for this interpretive move came from Freud’s remark that the “child-
hood memories” of individuals “offer a remarkable analogy with the child-
hood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.”37
This symbolic itinerary confirms—in a nonpsychoanalytic context—two
observations by Freud: that “these falsifications of memory are tendentious”38;
and that, given its “tendentious nature,” our memory often seems “to have
preserved what is indifferent and unimportant,” in spite of being “perma-
nent or constant” through a large part of our life.39 I could equally well speak
about the tendentious nature of oral memory in other parts of my work, such
as the displacement taking place in the women’s testimonies from memories
of abortion during the Fascist period—understood as a form of resistance to
Mussolini’s demographic policy—to their self-representations as subjects of
decisions over their own bodies.40 In this case, the memories did not come
from childhood, but from adulthood, and the projected identity was not sim-
ply of a rebel, but of one who made choices about her fertility in a specific
historical situation when these choices could be very dangerous. These memo-
ries were connected with a self-image influenced by the claims of the feminist
movement, which were in the forefront of the media at the time of the inter-
views, while feminism was represented by the interviewer herself. The inter-
views were in fact done at the end of the 1970s, when abortion in Italy was still
a crime against the race on the basis of the old Fascist law; in 1978 a law that
recognized the right of women to interrupt pregnancy in structures operat-
ing within the national health service was passed. However, a hot debate on
this issue continued until 1981, when a referendum was held, which tried to
repeal the new law, unsuccessfully, thus showing that a majority of the Italian
population was in favor of the right of abortion.
Another observation by Freud, that “mistakes in recollection cannot be
caused simply by a treacherous memory. Strong forces from later life have
been at work,”41 proved valuable in another area of my work with oral memo-
ries of Fascism. An oral tradition emerged spontaneously in the interviews
about a visit that Mussolini paid to the new Fiat factory at Mirafiori in May
1939. The story goes that when the Duce, following his ritual habit of magnil-
oquent dialogue with the crowd, asked the fifty thousand workers gathered
along the test-track on the top of the factory the question “Do you remem-
ber my Milan speech?,” he received, rather than the usual thundering reply,
a silence. In that speech, the dictator had promised greater social justice,
in particular to the workers. The oral tradition on this silence is confirmed
by written documents in the police archives in Rome. The fixation of this
episode in collective memory shows its importance to the collective iden-
tity of the Turinese working class.42 In the testimonies, it is linked with the
individuals’ conceptions of themselves, in the sense that it receives different
312 Luisa Passerini
emphasis depending on the person’s self-image: those who shared antifascist

attitudes did remember, while those favorable to the regime claimed they did
not remember the episode. Moreover, in many oral accounts, the episode is
said to have taken place in 1938 rather than 1939. My interpretation is that
those recalling the incident unconsciously preferred to anticipate the story
so as to imply that the hostility of the workers to Mussolini was not due to
the imminence of the war, but was a demonstration of the irreducible alterity
between the workers and the regime.
Showing how the fixing of a collective memory (and possible mistakes in
it) is linked to a drive to sustain a collective identity is a common proce-
dure in oral history. A good example is Alessandro Portelli’s analysis of the
discrepancies within the oral tradition surrounding the death of the worker
Luigi Trastulli, who died in a clash with the police in 1949 in Terni as workers
walked out of the factory to attend a rally against the signing of the North
Atlantic Treaty by the Italian government. The divergent popular narratives
of that event demonstrate that Trastulli’s death became the symbol of “the
postwar working-class experience in Terni as a whole.”43
I am convinced that for oral historians concerned to trace the connections
between memory, unconscious mental processes, and identity, it is Freud’s
so-called second topography that is the most valuable resource. This topog-
raphy proposes a model of the psyche organized in “three realms, regions,
provinces”: “the super-ego, the ego and the id,” each element of which has con-
scious and unconscious elements at work, rather than the earlier division of
the psyche into conscious, unconscious, and preconscious levels. This second
topography—or “dissection of the personality,” as the title of the subchapter
in the Freudian text goes—has an enormous advantage for oral historians. For
them as well and not only for psychoanalysts, the discovery “that portions
of the ego and super-ego as well are unconscious in the dynamic sense, oper-
ates as a relief.”44 The relief is indeed justified, because the subjectivity of the
narrators can be understood as complex in the sense that the conscious parts
of memory and identity are linked on the basis of unconscious roots. Thus,
instead of seeking access to unconscious memory through the transference
relationship in the way that a psychoanalyst does, the oral historian explores
discursive connections between conscious memories and identities and their
partially or even wholly unconscious mental correlates.
* * *
When I finally decided to go into psychoanalysis in the spring of 1984, it was

with a psychoanalyst of Jungian derivation, but with Freudian and Lacanian
influences. Of course, the clinical and theoretical formation of a psychoana-
lyst does not enter explicitly into the analytic treatment. However, discovering
my analyst’s orientation induced me to read more Jung and Jungians such as
Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Andrew Samuels, Mario Trevi45 —as
well as some writings by Lacan and Lacanians such as Jean Laplanche and
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Octave Mannoni, and Gennie and Paul Lemoine.46
What I found suggestive in Jungism for new developments of my work

was not so much the notion of collective unconscious47 (although it would
be very interesting to examine its use by Frantz Fanon48), but rather Jung’s
notion of the autonomy of symbolic life, of which myth-making is a funda-
mental form. Therefore myth-making was central to the individuation proc-
ess and foundational for the importance Jung attached to images and the
imagination.49 In the second half of the 1980s I developed a strong interest
in the history of the imaginary not only in the past but generally as a dimen-
sion of political culture, and in the role of myths in the modern world, which
in 1991 resulted in the book Mussolini Immaginario.50 In this book, I explored
the mental and visual images of the dictator diffused not only by official
Fascist propaganda but also by numerous biographies of the Duce written
spontaneously by Italian authors of all sorts.51 These images, I proposed, were
an example of the “individual mythologies of present-day men” described
by Károly Kerényi in his Prolegomena to his joint work with Jung, Essays on a
Science of Mythology.52
My starting point in Mussolini Immaginario was the idea that the two poles
represented by the dictator and the masses were born historically together and
conditioned each other. One of the themes of the book was the reciprocal mir-
roring of the dictator and the Italian people: his image embodied the myths
and stereotypes that had represented the Italians for centuries and promised
them a new identity, changing—as it did in the symbolic re-elaborations of
Mussolini’s biography—from being a migrant worker, Socialist and rebel-
lious, to being a steady and reliable figure. This “new Italian” was capable of
restoring the honor of Italy in the world and of founding a colonial empire.
Mussolini’s was a gendered image, emphasizing the Duce’s virility, while at
the same time being surrounded by female figures—of his mother, his wife,
his daughter, and the allegorical personification of Italy itself. But the Duce
could also embody both genders, since some of his images, for instance, in
school texts, attributed to him a motherly quality as well as virility.
In developing these ideas, I found Jung very useful for the link he draws
between images and myths, which are grounded in the unconscious. For
Jung, it is impossible to live without myths, which would mean living with-
out roots, without a relationship not just with the past but with the society of
one’s own time. “What is the myth that we are living?” Jung asks himself, and
then turns to Freud, who “reached similar conclusions regarding the archaic
nature of dream-thinking.”53 Jung postulates an affinity between dominant
motifs of dreams and psychoses, on the one hand, and “mythologemes”—the
recurrent themes in myths—on the other, and a coincidence between arche-
typal structures and mythical motifs.54
Thus I followed Mario Trevi into a “critical Jungism,” one that carefully
selects certain elements from the vast body of Jung’s thought while discard-
ing others. According to Trevi, the liveliest parts of Jung’s corpus are his
meditations on man as a “possible” animal. Rather than presupposing a col-
lective unconscious and the archetypes as immutable and meta-historical,
Trevi introduced the notion of the unconscious creative imagination, which
314 Luisa Passerini
is responsible for the elaboration of what Jung called “living symbols” around
which the psychic development of the individual turns. Trevi’s approach, as
he acknowledges, leads us to a “critical and conscious eclecticism,” which is
the only way to employ heuristic models guiding possible lines of research.55
In his 1946 lecture for the BBC, The Fight with the Shadow, Jung reconsid-
ered the history of Germany in the preceding half century. Just after World
War I, he had thought, on the basis of his experience with the dreams of
his patients, that “the tide that rose in the unconscious after the first World
War was reflected in individual dreams, in the form of collective, mytho-
logical symbols which expressed primitivity, violence, cruelty: in short, all
the powers of darkness.”56 In the same year, Jung stated that “the psycholo-
gist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history,” which has
“such a tremendous influence on the psychic life of the individual.”57 He
also referred58 to his essay The Role of the Unconscious (1918), which described
the reemergence—“as the Christian view of the world loses its authority”—of
the archetype of the “blond beast” from its underground prison, a primitive
force that he felt might have a “reactivation” in Germany at any time. It was
the “lower, darker half” of the two halves in which “Christianity split the
Germanic barbarian,” and it remained “associated with the vestiges of the
prehistoric age.”59 Retrospectively, he was interpreting this visionary analysis
of the historical situation of postwar Europe as a forecast of Nazism, under-
stood as a reemergence of the negative side of the “primitive.”
In 1946, Jung specified that the “blond beast” was not restricted to Germany,
but stood for “the primitive European in general.” “National-socialism,”
he wrote, “was one of those psychological mass phenomena, one of those
outbreaks of the collective unconscious, about which I had been speaking
for nearly twenty years.”60 Aware that the positions he had taken during
Nazism were strongly stigmatized, Jung also insisted that his works had been
included in the Nazi blacklist. However, in 1934 he had published an article,
The State of Psychotherapy Today, in the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre
Grenzgebiete, the official organ of the International General Medical Society
for Psychotherapy, in which he had postulated a difference between the
unconscious of the Jewish race and the “Aryan” unconscious.”61 In another
1934 article, he referred to “the difference between Jewish and ‘Aryan-Germ
anic-Christian-European’ psychology.”62 While I considered these positions
completely unacceptable, as well as his judgment that women and Jews have
the same peculiarity in common of “being physically weaker,”63 nonethe-
less I found his reflections on the popular success of Fascism as a collective
regression useful. His account of the regressive fascination—coupled with
violence—of Nazism seemed to me applicable to the history of subjectivity
under the Italian regime.
Working in the field of the imaginary, I positioned myself in a disciplinary
area that I defined as social psychology in historical perspective, with the
explicit aim of providing new interpretations of Fascism that would link it
with present concerns.64 However, my point of reference was not the vast
literature on social psychology but rather some French historians of the
imaginary, considered as part of the effort of the nouvelle histoire originating

from the Annales to enlarge the territory of the historian,65 and especially
some works by Lacan.
Lacan’s concept of the imaginary as a field of relations proved indispen-
sable for my purposes, especially as he developed it in his Seminar. Book I, in
which there appears the following passages, which I underlined: “History is
not the past. History is the past in so far as it is historicised in the present—
historicised in the present because it was lived in the past,” and: “I would
say—when all is said and done, it is less a matter of remembering than of
rewriting history.”66 These words were particularly meaningful for somebody
engaged in the historical study of memory. But the writing by Lacan that
influenced me most was The Topic of the Imaginary, in which he discusses a
1930 article by Melanie Klein on symbol formation.67 Here Lacan explains
the distinction between the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. Human
beings achieve “an imaginary mastery” over their bodies before gaining a
real mastery of them, by seeing their images in mirror: “this is the original
adventure through which man, for the first time, has the experience of seeing
himself, of reflecting on himself as other than he is—an essential dimen-
sion of the human, which entirely structures his fantasy life.”68 But, in the
child, “development only takes place in so far as the subject integrates him-
self into the symbolic system, acts within it, asserts himself in it through the
use of genuine speech”; only then “the subject can introduce an interplay
between the imaginary and the real and master his development.”69 Similarly,
I hypothesized, there could be a tension between the imaginary and the real
in historical terms, not only for the individual, but also for the collective, and
this was true both in the case of Mussolini and for other imaginaries.
While Lacan was crucial for understanding the role of the imaginary
between the real and the symbolic, Jung’s reading had shown how at the
same time the imaginary in its various forms could be a “living myth” for
many people, living under the pressure of violence and opportunism exer-
cised by Fascism and Nazism in order to reinforce their mythologies. These
two authors were also precious for interpreting another, more recent histori-
cal phenomenon, “red” terrorism. Studying the interviews that I had done
in the Turin prison, with women who had belonged to the Red Brigades
and Prima Linea (Front Line),70 Jungism explained the revitalization of the
myth of the revolutionary guerrilla, while Lacan’s reading was seminal for
suggesting an interpretation—in terms of the history of subjectivity—of
red terrorism’s thorny political and historical relationship with 1968. The
“imagination au pouvoir,” I hypothesized, which for the movements of
1968 was to contribute to the overthrow of the established order, was liter-
alized and impoverished in the brutal imaginary of terrorism, and blended
with a military extremism in a praxis that thus lost any political character.
“Imagination au pouvoir” in 1968 had meant challenging power in a radical
way by inventing new forms of communication and intersubjectivity, which
allowed new relationships between subjects, and within the subject itself,
to be imagined and put into practice. My distinction between the terrorist
316 Luisa Passerini
imaginary and the 1968 imagination as a new form of (inter)subjectivity was

inspired by the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic—and
of course the real—as the three essential orders of the psychoanalytic field
drawn by Lacan: May 1968’s “imagination” was close to the symbolic and
the real, while terrorism’s rigid imaginary was imprisoned in the repetition
of Leninist and Maoist stereotypes.
Lacan’s work proved inspirational again when applied to the study of emo-
tions in historical perspective. I had used psychoanalysis in my first book
on the historical connection between the idea of Europe and the concepts
of courtly and romantic love in Britain in the interwar period in a rather
straightforward way, that is, employing some of Freud’s and Jung’s works to
analyze the cultural atmosphere of the interwar period.71 My second book on
the same topic took into consideration again the role of courtly love in the
self-representations of Europeans and their conceptions of love, this time in
the discourses of love in France and Italy from the 1920s to the 1940s.72 Lacan
did not deny the historical basis of courtly love, which was “rooted in the dis-
course of fealty, of fidelity to the person” in feudalism. He defined courtly love
as a “an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation
by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it, and a male discourse that
men use as an elegant way of compensating for this lack.”73 In this passage,
“absence” should not be understood as if Provençal love was sexless—as it has
wrongly been assumed by some romantic interpretations—but as the impos-
sibility of the relationship with the other in the sexual encounter. At the
same time, Lacan exposed the masculine nature of the discourse of courtly
love, which—I believe—since this discourse has always been considered as
the origin of modern European subjectivity, was historically connected to the
assumption of the privileged European subject as male, Christian, and white.
For Lacan, the strength of courtly discourse lies precisely in being fully aware
of and even emphasizing the impossibility of sexual relation, because pleas-
ure, being sexual, is phallic, that is, it is not related to the Other as such.74
In this way Lacan’s psychoanalytic interpretation of courtly love took into
account the fact that courtly discourse postulated love as the impossibility
of a relationship with the other while proclaiming that speaking of love con-
stitutes a pleasure in itself. In this context, using—although without entirely
agreeing with—Luce Irigaray’s criticisms of Lacan, I was able to reintroduce
the idea of the female subject in Provençal love, with reference to the figure
of the trobairitz.75 This reintroduction is not only more faithful to historical
truth, but it is also consistent with a new conception of the European subject
as decentered, multiple, and nonhierarchical.76
* * *
This chapter is far from being complete, but it would be even more so if I did
not mention my effort to conjugate psychoanalysis and history in the liter-
ary montage that constitutes Autobiography of a Generation.77 In this book, my
autobiographical memories and the interviews with protagonists of 1968 in
Italy are intertwined with the description of my psychoanalysis, which took

place in the years 1984–1990. In her generous foreword to the English transla-
tion, Joan Scott wrote that this book “is novel and compelling history,” which
“demonstrates not only that a history of subjectivity is possible, but also that
psychoanalysis can enable the writing of such a history.”78 Although I have
repeatedly expressed doubts whether Autobiography of a Generation is a histori-
cal project in the strict sense of the word (a defensive doubt after all), I would
like to add here my afterthought—which has taken 15 years to emerge—to
the challenge posed by Joan Scott’s comment. Literally speaking, a historical
approach is present only in the central chapter of the book, the fourth, which
is a history of 1968 in Turin and is based on both oral and written sources;
indeed, this chapter was also published in a historical journal, with the addi-
tion of footnotes.79 But I can now see that the structure of the book is itself his-
torical since it combines chronological order with other forms of temporality.
Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7 consist of diaries, organized by month, respectively, of
the years 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987, and each one of these chapters is inter-
spersed with memories of my past. Chapters 2 and 6 are based on interviews,
one dealing with memories of the 1950s and 1960s, and the other with memo-
ries of the 1970s, so that they move between various times. Thus the structure
alternates the more psychoanalytical and diary-like chapters with those that
propose a historical contextualization of excerpts from interviews, shuttling
“back and forth between different layers of temporality.”80
It is this very alternation that I now think can be considered as a contribu-
tion to the history of subjectivity, and indeed the history of intersubjectivity.
The title of the first chapter is Mirrors, which explicitly refers to the recipro-
cal mirroring of my own story with those of the protagonists of 1968 that I
had interviewed. But this title refers as well implicitly to the mirror that the
experience of psychoanalysis had offered me; to the relationship not only
with my analyst, but also with the other figures of my past and present emo-
tional life that were enlivened by the transference.81 This second meaning I
think is crucial: it was in this sense that psychoanalysis allowed me to put my
own story as well as that of a part of my generation in historical perspective.
However, I still believe that without footnotes, that is, without references
to sources accessible to everybody else, there is no real historical discipline,
because the system of references is a prerogative of history’s epistemological
status, just as is the critique of sources, and to each source a specific type of
critique pertains. Still, the historical contribution of the book can be envis-
aged as a series of suggestive cues or insights that might be useful to articu-
late various histories—in the plural—of subjectivity and intersubjectivity,
in as far as it does expose the links between different subjects in different
times and spaces. At the same time, I would like to stress the wide differ-
ence between autobiography and ego-histoire, mainly because the second has
a strong methodological slant and it can be, as the volume that inaugurated it
shows, an intellectual and metahistorical enterprise. Autobiography can take
many different forms, but it usually moves between two genres, which are
literature and history, often in its political variety.82
318 Luisa Passerini
I cannot and I don’t wish to push any further, in this chapter, my reflec-
tion on Autobiography of a Generation: this book has taken on a life of its
own, and it has gone its own way, while I went mine. When the Italian edi-
tion was republished in 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of 1968, I had to
reread the whole book and I found that I had largely forgotten what I had
written. Moreover, through the years many people have commented on this
book, so that I feel now that the book belongs to some extent to them as
well. Indeed, the comments have often revealed to me aspects that either
I had never thought of, such as the relevance of food in the book, or that
are still so engrained in my emotional structure, such as the nexus gender/
generation /memory—in connection with my experience of a specific wave
of feminism—that I have not yet been able to disentangle them.83 All consid-
ered, what I believe is appropriate as a concluding remark in this chapter is
to hint at the affinities I see between my past engagement in the relationship
between psychoanalysis and autobiography—or more generally history—and
some ongoing directions of research, which seem to me to follow implicitly
and to update the same inspiration of Autobiography of a Generation.
The first direction is represented by the experimental work being done in
Milan by the School of Philosophical Practices, based on the role of autobiog-
raphy and biography in a psychoanalytic and philosophical formation aimed
at the care of the other.84 A second direction of research, which concerns
the link between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, explores the connections
between the textual or verbal parts of analysis and the nonverbal or emo-
tional aspects of it.85 And a third direction considers the relation between
psychoanalysis and postcolonial history. The Freudian lesson that the subject
is inhabited by an unknowable otherness can no longer be interpreted as if
the other were the primitive, and “primitive man” could represent the sav-
agery of Europe’s prior selves.86 The traces of racism present in the heritage
of psychoanalysis must be taken into account and racial themes must come
to the forefront. Far from being only a practice of deconstruction, this could
be an enterprise recognizing the existence of plural subjectivities oriented
toward the future.
I may not be able to take up any of these directions of research myself, but
I am satisfied that others are developing them, thus tracing new paths for the
relationship between psychoanalysis and history.
Notes
The term “ego-histoire ” was coined by Pierre Nora, editor of Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris:
Gallimard, 1987), in order to indicate “a new genre for a new age of historical conscious-
ness,” neither straightforward autobiography nor proclamation of principles. In his
Présentation to the volume, he wrote he had proposed to the authors (Maurice Agulhon,
Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, and René
Rémond) to apply to themselves the same method and gaze that they had applied to other
objects of study, in order to “make explicit the link between the history some historians
had done and the history that had done these historians.” See also Luisa Passerini and
Alexander G. T. Geppert (eds.), European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970–2000,
Special Issue of Historein. A review of the past and other stories. 3 (2001), which collects the
ego-histoires of Pierre Nora, John Brewer, Antonis Liakos, Barbara Taylor, Leonid Borodkin,
Barbara Duden, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Lutz Niethammer.
1. Such as the one by Lucien Sève, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité (Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1969), translated into Italian in 1973. So at least I thought at the time, but I
have never reread this book. What follows is based on the section of my library con-
cerning psychoanalysis, in which I have kept the books mentioned here (all carefully
underlined and annotated).
2. I was particularly impressed by Elvio Fachinelli, Il bambino dalle uova d’oro. Brevi scritti
con testi di Freud, Reich, Benjamin e Rose Thé (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), on the “Uncanny”
in psychoanalysis, and by his La freccia ferma. Tre tentativi di fermare il tempo (Milan:
L’erba voglio, 1979), which included a reflection on Fascism as a reaction to the “death
of the fatherland.” Fachinelli was among the founders in the 1960s (others being Lea
Melandri and Luisa Muraro, who were to have important roles in the feminist move-
ment) of the group “L’erba voglio” (The “I-want” grass), very active in fostering forms
of nonauthoritarian practice in schools. By Cesare Musatti—the eminent Freudian psy-
choanalyst and curator of Freud’s complete works in Italian—I remember Freud (Turin:
Boringhieri, 1959), and Mia sorella gemella la psicoanalisi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982).
Also very influential in Italy was his Trattato di psicoanalisi (Turin: Einaudi, 1949).
3. H(ilda) D(oolittle), Tribute to Freud, with Unpublished Letters by Freud to the Author (New
York: Pantheon, 1956), translated into Italian in 1973; Lou Andreas-Salomé, In der Schule
bei Freud (Zurich: Max Niehans, 1958), It. trans. 1977.
4. My friends and I were very impressed by the positions taken by these authors in the
Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation held in London in July 1967. See David Cooper,
ed., The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). I remember reading
and underlining vigorously David Cooper, The Death of the Family (London: Allen Lane,
1971), It. trans. 1972; and Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1972).
We read with passion Ronald D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1959); The
Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); The Politics
of the Family and Other Essays (London: Tavistock, 1969); Knots (London: Tavistock,
1970); The Self and Others (London: Tavistock, 1959); and R. D. Laing-Aaron Esterson,
Sanity, Madness and the Family. Families of Schizophrenics (London: Tavistock, 1964); all
translated into Italian between 1968 and 1974.
5. See Associazione per la lotta contro le malattie mentali [Association for the struggle
against mental illnesses], ed., La fabbrica della follia. Relazione sul manicomio di Torino
[The factory of madness. Report on Turin’s mental asylum] (Turin: Einaudi, 1971).
This book was published by Einaudi in the Serie Politica (Political Series), in which
Franco Basaglia and Franca Basaglia Ongaro, eds., Morire di classe [Class dying] also
appeared, along with books on China, Vietnam, working students, the Black Panthers,
the Berkeley student movement, as well as books by Malcolm X, Giovanni Arrighi, Leo
Huberman, and Paul Sweezy, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Basil Davidson, Frantz Fanon, and
my own book on the liberation struggle in Mozambique.
6. Erving Goffman, Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other
Inmates (Doubleday, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), It. trans. 1968.
7. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), It. trans. 1976; John
Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (London: Tavistock, 1979), pub-
lished in Italy in 1982.
8. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York:
Morrow, 1970), It. trans. 1971; Elena Gianini Belotti, Dalla parte delle bambine [On the
side of little girls] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973).
9. I use this term to indicate the groups of the Italian new left, such as Lotta Continua,
Potere Operaio, as well as the smaller Gruppo Gramsci to which I belonged, in order to
distinguish them from the feminist separatist groups that started in 1970.
10. Freud had warned against the risks of Wilde Psychoanalyse as it could be practiced by
analysts with insufficient formation; in the 1970s some feminist groups in France and
320 Luisa Passerini
Italy challenged this definition, experimenting a psychoanalysis practiced by women

with women and free from male instrumentalization.
11. Mitchell Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
12. Some of the Italian translations were from the German and some from the English edi-
tions: Wilhelm Reich, Die Sexualität in Kulturkampf (Copenhagen: Sexpol-Verlag, 1936),
It. trans. 1963 and revised edition 1970; The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), It. trans. 1971; The Murder of Christ (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1953), It. trans. 1972; The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), It. trans. 1972; Character Analysis (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1973), It. trans. 1973; of a book that was most important to us, The
Function of the Orgasm, first volume of The Discovery of the Orgone, published in Italy in
1971, I cannot find the original editions in English or German.
13. Between 1966 and 1976, Italian translations were published of Georg Groddeck,
Das Buch vom Es. Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1961);
Psychoanalytische Schriften zur Psychosomatik (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1964); Psychoanalytische
Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1966); Der Seelensucher. Ein psycho-
analytischer Roman (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1971).
14. Wilhelm Reich, La lotta sessuale dei giovani (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1972).
15. Michael Bálint, L’amore primario. Gli inesplorati confini tra biologia e psicoanalisi (Rimini:
Guaraldi, 1973), a collection of essays among which was Primary Love and Psycho-analytic
Technique. No Italian translation existed at the time of Sándor Ferenczi’s Thalassa, so I read
the French one, Thalassa. Psychanalyse des origins de la vie sexuelle (Paris: Payot, 1962).
16. The conference was organized by Armando Verdiglione, who later on was accused in
court of being an impostor, a story that was never completely clear. The documents
of the conference were published in Armando Verdiglione, ed., Sessualità e politica.
Documenti del Congresso internazionale di psicanalisi, Milano, 25–28 novembre 1975 (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1976).
17. Antonio Gramsci observed that it is possible to explain the historical subjectivity of a
social group as a historical fact in his Prison’s Notebooks (Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del
carcere [Turin: Einaudi, 1975], vol. II, 1226).
18. I had found very inspiring the sections of Michel De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris:
Gallimard, 1975), on Freud and the writing of history, but the debate on history and
psychoanalysis had not yet started in Italy, although there had been some discussion
on psychohistory (Linda La Penna, “La Psychohistory: proposte e studi nella storiografia
americana,” Quaderni storici 47 [1981], 574–605). The seminal book by Peter Gay, Freud
for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), was translated in 1989. Only much
later, an important Italian history journal decided to devote one of its Forums to the
topic: Carlotta Sorba, “Tra storia e psicoanalisi,” Contemporanea XI. 2 (2008), 257–299,
with writings by Carlotta Sorba, Antonis Liakos, Peter N. Stearns, Luisa Passerini, Daniel
Wickberg, and Giovanni Starace. Among recent literature I found suggestive the collec-
tion by Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds, eds., History on the Couch. Essays in History and
Psychanalysis (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003).
19. The only author I cannot help quoting in the field of anthropology is Ernesto De
Martino, who had an enormous influence on Italian oral historians. I was deeply struck
by his remark that we should abandon “the naïf belief in history as a past and as an out-
side” (Ernesto De Martino, Naturalismo e storicismo nell’etnologia [Bari: Laterza, 1941], 14)
and by his claim that the magic practises in the south of Italy were based on a “request
for psychological protection from the extraordinary power of the negative in daily life”
and they must be connected with the hegemonic forms of dominant culture, such as
Catholicism (Ernesto De Martino, Sud e magia [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966], 8–10).
20. A report on the difficulties I experienced as my research was in progress can be found
in my article “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” History Workshop
8 (1979), 90–92.
21. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working
Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), translation of Torino operaia e
fascismo (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1984), 69, 86, 88.
22. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1962 ff.), from now
on SE, vol. VIII (1905): Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1962.
23. Freud, Jokes, 19. See also 164–167.
24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993).
25. Jean Laplanche and Jacques-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (New
York-London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), Entry Unconscious, 474.
26. Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960),
explores the history of the notion of the unconscious in Western thought from the
seventeenth century onward.
27. Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories (1899), SE, vol. III (193–1899): Early Psycho-Analytic
Publications, 1962, 303.
28. Ibid., 305.
29. Ibid., 306–307.
30. Ibid., 320.
31. Ibid., 306.
32. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language, Entry Screen-memory, 411.
33. Sigmund Freud, SE, vol. XII (1911–1913), The Case of Schreber. Papers on Technique and Other
Works, 1962 : Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Further Recommendations on
the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II) 1914, 145–156, here 148. See also The Interpretation of
Dreams, SE, 1962 (B), The Work of Displacement, 305–309.
34. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 5: the term
“transposition” “indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in
the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quan-
titative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex
multiplicities.”
35. Freud, Screen Memories, SE, vol. III, 317.
36. Passerini, Fascism, chapter 1.
37. Ibid., 48.
38. Freud, Screen Memories, SE, vol. III, 322.
39. Freud, SE, vol. VI (1901), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 43 and 45.
40. Passerini, Fascism, chapter 4.
41. Ibid., 47.
42. I understand by “collective memory” a narrative corpus composed of individual narra-
tions in which recurrences can be found that constitute a discursive tradition. This does
not imply that only collective memory exists, as in the classical position by Maurice
Halbwachs in his book On Collective Memory (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
43. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories. Form and Meaning in
Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 26.
44. Freud, SE, vol. XXII (1932–1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis and Other
Works, 1964, 71–72. In this passage, Freud mentions that the term “id” (Es in German)
was suggested by Georg Groddeck.
45. Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales (Boston-London: Shambhala,
1993); Andrew Samuels, The Plural Psyche. Personality, Morality, and the Father (London:
Routledge, 1989); Mario Trevi, Per uno junghismo critico (Milan: Bompiani, 1987). I was
very impressed by James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1983), on
the use of stories in therapy and the suggestion to see “the inner necessity of historical
events, out there, in the events themselves, where ‘inner’ no longer means private and
owned by a self or a soul or an ego, where inner is not a literalized place inside a subject,
but the subjectivity in events and that attitude which interiorizes those events, goes into
them in search of psychological depth,” 25, so as to be able “to digest events,” 27.
46. Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire. L’autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), and Ça
n’empêche pas d’exister (Paris: Seuil, 1982). Gennie and Paul Lemoine, Le psychodrame
(Paris: Laffont, 1972). Mannoni presented a new way of looking at the imaginary, which
322 Luisa Passerini
complemented and corrected my historical approach to the term, while the Lemoines
treated the topic of psychodrama, very important as a form of therapy, contamination
between genres, and political intervention.
47. The term is already in Freud. When he applies the notion of the “repressed” to the life of
whole peoples, in reference to the return of the parricide “to the memory of mankind”
(Freud, SE, vol. XXIII [1937–1939]: Moses and Monotheism. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis
and Other Works, 1964, 135), he admits that “we cannot at first sight say in what form
this past existed during the time of its eclipse,” because it is not easy “to carry over the
concepts of individual psychology into group psychology,” and, he adds, significantly:
“[A]nd I do not think we gain anything by introducing the concept of a ‘collective’
unconscious. The content of the unconscious, indeed, is in any case a collective, uni-
versal property of mankind.”
48. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, quoted by Michael Vannoy Adams, The
Multicultural Imagination. “Race,” Color, and the Unconscious (London-New York:
Routledge, 1996), 63 ff.
49. Mario Trevi, Preface to Carl Gustav Jung and Károly Kerényi, Prolegomeni allo studio
scientifico della mitologia (Essays on a Science of Mythology) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1972),
5–7.
50. Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia 1915–1939 (Bari: Laterza,
1991).
51. I examined around one thousand titles, including many school texts, as well as filmic
and photographic material from the Istituto Luce, Rome. This institute was created in
1924 with the intent of developing public education through moving images; it soon
became a powerful instrument of the Fascist propaganda.
52. Károly Kerényi, Prolegomena, in Jung Carl Gustav and Károly Kerényi, Introduction to a
Science of Mythology. The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F.
C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 1–32, here 31. I found this and other
works by Kerényi particularly useful when I worked on the revitalization of the myth of
Europa in contemporary Europe. See my Il mito d’Europa (Florence: Giunti, 2002).
53. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard
Adler, vol. 5: Symbols of Transformation. An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia,
trans. by R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 24.
54. Jung, Symbols, 312–313.
55. Trevi, Per uno junghismo, 100–101 and 110.
56. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 10: Civilization in Transition, 1974. The relevance
of dreams for understanding Nazism is very evident in the extraordinary collection by
Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985).
The author started in 1933 interviewing three hundred people about their dreams,
which, according to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, had a premonitory value, antici-
pating the “aspect of empiric unlikelyhood” that was to appear later on in the final
catastrophe (Preface to Il terzo Reich dei sogni [Torino: Einaudi, 1991], XVIII–XIX). On
dreams, see History Workshop Journal 48 (1999), and 49 (2000).
57. Jung, Preface, Essays on Contemporary Events 10, 177–178.
58. Jung, Epilogue to Essays on Contemporary Events 10, 227–243.
59. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung 10, 3–28, here 12–13 and 16.
60. Jung, Epilogue 227 and 237.
61. Now in 10, 157–173, here 166.
62. Jung, A Rejoinder to Dr. Bally 10, 535–544, here 540.
63. Jung, The State of Psychotherapy Today 10, 165.
64. Luisa Passerini, “L’immagine di Mussolini: specchio dell’immaginario e promessa di
identità,” Rivista di storia contemporanea, July 3, 1986, XV. 322–349, here 322.
65. Evelyne Patlagean, “L’histoire de l’imaginaire,” in Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and
Jacques Revel, eds., La nouvelle histoire (Paris: CEPL, 1978), 249–269; Jacques Le Goff,
L’imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); and essays by François Lissarrague and
Michel Vovelle.
66. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique
1953–1954, trans. by John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
12 and 14.
67. Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego,”
in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921–45, published in 1948, now in The Writings of
Melanie Klein, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1975).
68. Lacan, The Seminar. Book I, 76–77 and 79.
69. Ibid., 82 and 86. See also Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language, Entries Imaginary, 210,
and Symbolic, 439–441.
70. The interviews were collected in a seminar held in prison by an agreement between
the University of Turin and the Carceri Nuove of Turin, meeting once a week from
January to June 1987. See Luisa Passerini, “Lacerations in the Memory: Women in the
Italian Underground Organisations,” International Social Movement Research 4 (1992):
Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organisations (Greenwich,
CN-London: JAI Press, 1992), 161–212.
71. Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics in Britain between
the Wars (London: Tauris, 1999), 81–100.
72. Luisa Passerini, Love and the Idea of Europe (Oxford-New York: Berghahn, 2009); paper-
back edition: Women and Men in Love, European Identities in the Twentieth Century, 2010.
73. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., God and the Jouissance of The Woman, in
Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. by Jacqueline Rose
(London: Macmillan, 1982), 137–148, here 141.
74. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. XX. Encore (1972–1973) (Paris: Seuil, 1999).
75. Irigaray Luce, Ce sex qui n’est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).
76. Passerini, Love and the Idea, 207–208.
77. Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation. Italy 1968 (Hanover-London: Wesleyan
78. Joan Scott, Foreword, in ibid., XIII–XIV.
79. This chapter was published with the title “Le mouvement de 1968 comme prise de
parole et comme explosion de subjectivité: le cas de Turin,” Mouvement Social, Special
issue on “Mémoires et histoires de 1968.” 143 (1988), 39–74.
80. Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago-London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 260. A shrewd analysis of this point is in Lisa Baraitser, “Delay:
On Temporality in Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation,” European Journal of
Women’s Studies, 19.3 (2012), 38–385.
81. Jeremy Popkin, who writes that “Passerini’s individual initiative in writing about herself
can be seen as an expression of shared historical experience,” underlines the presence of
psychoanalysis, including the analyst’s reactions in the writing as the way to problema-
tize the authorial “I” and question its privileged place in the narrative (Popkin, History,
258–259). Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiographies
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), stresses the “deliberate contesta-
tion of the scale of values that privileges the public realm of theory and history,” 149.
82. Richard Vinen, “The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical
Writing,” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011), 531, argues that the recent fashion
for autobiographical writing among historians goes with a rehabilitation of contempo-
rary history, which was sometimes regarded with disdain during the mid-1960s.
83. On food, Julia Heim of Cuny Graduate Center, New York, in 2010 wrote an unpub-
lished paper on Reading between the Food in Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation,
which has a few references to writings on this same topic. On the question of gender,
see Veronica Pravadelli, “Taking Gender Seriously: Luisa Passerini’s Quest for Female
Subjectivity Between the Self and the Collective,” European Journal of Women’s Studies,
19.3 (2012), 371–376.
84. Founded by Romano Màdera (see also his book) Il nudo piacere di vivere (Milan:
A. Mondadori, 2006). This school has also originated a series of seminars on the
324 Luisa Passerini
“psychological history of Italy” in an old people’s home near Bergamo, conducted

by Andrea Arrighi. Arrighi followed groups of up to 15 women and men who were
interested in Italian history. They would meet weekly for ten times, being shown sec-
tions of original documentaries as well as of historical films concerning the period
from World War I to the 1980s. They were then invited to comment what they had
seen, not so much in the sense of tracing a historical “truth,” but of reconstructing
the cultural atmosphere of a certain period as they had lived it and as they had heard
it from their parents.
85. Giuseppe Martini, Ermeneutica e narrazione. Un percorso tra psichiatria e psicoanalisi
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990).
86. Maggie Nolan, “Displacing Indigenous Australians: Freud’s Totem and Taboo,” in
Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds, eds., History on the Couch. Essays in History and
Psychanalysis (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 60–70.
Afterword
Peter Burke
This stimulating set of chapters needs no summary here, but it does present
an opportunity for some general reflections on the relation between psycho-
analysis and history. What is or should be this relation? To what extent was
Freud’s view of the psyche shaped by his own position in time (1856–1939), space
(Moravia, then Vienna), and society (the Jewish professional middle class)? Were
individuals in earlier centuries “‘prepsychoanalytic’,” as Stephen Greenblatt has
suggested?1 How seriously should we take Freud’s ideas about history, culture,
and society? Is psychoanalysis (as Barbara Taylor asks) an aid to empathy, or, on
the contrary, a means to distanciation from the past (as Adam Phillips suggests),
or can it be both? Can historians learn to understand the past either by studying
Freud’s writings or should they, like Peter Gay, undergo an analysis themselves?
Do some of Freud’s followers, including the heretics—Jung or Horney or Lacan,
for instance—offer more plausible solutions to some of the problems that he
raised? Is eclecticism (especially a critical eclecticism) preferable to orthodoxy?
Can the psychoanalytical method be adapted from the diagnosis of patients to
the study of texts and images? Is there a method at all, or would it be better to
speak of intuition?2
Most of these questions are old ones, since what might be called the “age
of the pioneers” in this field goes back almost a century. It was in 1913 that
the American historian Preserved Smith published an article on Luther (dis-
cussed earlier in this volume by Lyndal Roper) describing him as a neurotic.
In 1919 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (who was hostile to Freud’s ideas,
but took Ernst Kretschmer seriously) described late medieval Europeans, in
his famous study The Autumn of the Middle Ages, as susceptible to stronger
emotions than their twentieth-century successors, oscillating between sor-
row and anger, tears and violence.3 This description of the late medieval psy-
che underlay a well-known essay by the French historian Lucien Febvre (who
derived his psychology from Charles Blondel and Henri Wallon rather than
Freud), as well as the still more famous study of The Civilizing Process (1939) by
the German sociologist Norbert Elias, who used The Autumn of the Middle Ages
as a baseline for his account of the gradual rise of self-control in the sixteenth
325
326 Peter Burke
and seventeenth centuries. Much later, in an interview that he gave in 1985,

Elias declared that “without Freud, I would not have been able to write what
I have written,” while adding that it was necessary to go beyond Freud and
recognize changes in the personality structure over time.4
The age of the pioneers lasted until the 1950s, a decade marked by three
remarkable books in this field as well as a much-quoted lecture. The three
books, each written in a different country, are The Greeks and the Irrational
(1951) by the Irish classicist E. R. Dodds; Metabletica (1956) by the Dutch psy-
chiatrist Jan Hendrik van den Berg; and Young Man Luther (1958) by the Danish
American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (discussed once again by Lyndal Roper).5
The lecture, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association in 1957 by its president William L. Langer, argued that the “next
assignment” of the profession should be what he called “the urgently needed
deepening of our historical understanding through exploitation of the con-
cepts and findings of modern psychology,” especially psychoanalysis. Langer
made his reputation as a relatively traditional diplomatic historian, the author
of books such as European Alliances and Alignments, 1871–1890 (1931), but he
underwent analysis himself while his younger brother Walter was a practicing
psychoanalyst.6
So far as historians’ awareness of psychoanalysis and other psycholo-
gies is concerned, it is surely the decade of the sixties, a time of so many
breaks with tradition, that most deserves the title of the “age of discovery.”
In the United States, one historian, Bruce Mazlish, argued for closer relations
between the two disciplines in his Psychoanalysis and History (1963), while
another, Richard Hofstadter, published a celebrated study of The Paranoid
Style in American Politics (1965).7 In Britain, the Romanian sociologist Zevedei
Barbu published his Problems of Historical Psychology (1960) while Dodds pro-
duced a second study, The Age of Anxiety (1965), concerned this time with the
late Roman Empire.8 In France, Alain Besançon, a historian of Russia associ-
ated with the so-called Annales School, published the first of a number of
essays on the topic, commenting on Van den Berg’s Metabletica.9 It was once
again in Annales, a historical journal unusually accommodating to different
approaches and disciplines, that the Hungarian ethno-psychiatrist George
Devereux published an essay examining the history of Sparta from a psycho-
analytical point of view.10
By contrast, the 1970s might be described as the “age of debate”—especially
in the United States. A conference on psychoanalysis and history took place at
the City University of New York in 1971, organized by one of the leaders of the
historical profession in the United States at that time, Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr. Besançon and Mazlish continued to advocate what was becoming known
in English as “‘psychohistory’,” joined by Michel de Certeau, Saul Friedländer,
Lloyd DeMause, and others.11
On the other side, in Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, best known as a social
historian, published a critical discussion of history and psychoanalysis in
the respected and generally conservative journal, the Historische Zeitschrift
(1969).12 Open attacks on psychohistory were launched by the British
Afterword 327
historian Geoffrey Barraclough (in an article in the Guardian in 1973, pro-

claiming that “Psychohistory is Bunk”) and by the French American historian
Jacques Barzun, who concluded his Clio and the Doctors (1974), with the hope
that “in any new vale which the muses may elect for their abode, Clio will
again be found among them, virgo intacta,” a proposition that itself requires
a Freudian analysis. A more moderate critique came from David Stannard,
while the pros and cons of psychohistory were examined in a balanced man-
ner by the historians Frank Manuel and Fred Weinstein and the sociologist
Gerald M. Platt.13
Despite these controversies, one might say that it was in the 1970s that psy-
chohistory or historical psychology ceased to be “‘the next assignment”’ and
began to be incorporated into historical practice. It was at this time that an
article on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appeared in the American Historical
Review, the leading journal of the historical profession in the United States.14
The substantive studies of historical psychology published in this decade
range from family life and child-rearing in early modern France and colonial
America to the psychology of Nazi anti-Semitism, the history of fear, the
history of the French passions, and the analysis of a case of demonic posses-
sion in provincial France in the seventeenth century (by the polymath Jesuit
Michel de Certeau, who frequented Lacan’s seminar).15 It is worth noting that
three of these six studies were written by French historians and two by North
Americans.
Since the 1970s, there has been a steady trickle of substantive studies of
this kind. In the 1980s, Peter Gay began publishing his four-volume history
of the emotions in the nineteenth century, while Henry Rousso examined
what he called the “Vichy syndrome,” discussed later, and Carol and Peter
Stearns attempted to launch the study of what they called “‘emotionology.”16
In the 1990s, Lynn Hunt published a remarkable psychohistory of the French
Revolution and Luisa Passerini her studies of the image of Mussolini and of
the crisis of the 1930s.17 However, this trickle has never turned into a stream.
The outcome of the great debate of the 1970s remains unclear: neither vic-
tory nor defeat, general acceptance or general rejection. At a time of so many
turns, the discipline of history has not yet experienced a psychological turn,
let alone a psychoanalytic one.
All the same, whether they study individuals, groups, or whole cultures,
a number of historians (myself included) find it difficult to do without a
repertoire of ideas derived from the psychoanalytic movement, among them
condensation, defense mechanisms, displacement, the inferiority complex,
paranoia, projection, repression, sublimation, and trauma. Other concepts
(such as containing and narcissism, discussed in this volume by Elizabeth
Lunbeck and Michael Roper) should doubtless be added to the list. My guess
would be that the majority of professional historians today are not only
more concerned with subjectivity, or experience, than their predecessors
(with distinguished exceptions such as Edward Thompson) used to be, but
also more open to the possibility that a psychoanalytic approach can aid the
understanding of the past.
328 Peter Burke
A small minority of historians, some of them at the top of the profession,

have “come out” as scholars who openly accept the relevance of psychoanaly-
sis to their interpretations of history. They include Alain Besançon, Michel
de Certeau, Jean Delumeau, Saul Friedländer, Peter Gay, Sander Gilman,
Lynn Hunt, Luisa Passerini, and more recently Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper.
Another sign of changing times is the rapid rise of the history of the emo-
tions. When Zeldin, Delumeau, and Gay began to write histories of this kind,
the idea that the emotions had a history was still unusual, almost eccentric.
Since the year 2000, on the other hand, studies have multiplied, especially in
Germany, a number of them focusing on the ways in which emotions have
been represented and the question whether they are expressed or construct-
ed.18 Institutes and centers for the study of emotional history have also multi-
plied recently, in Amsterdam, for example, Berlin (the Max Planck Institute),
London (Queen Mary), the University of Western Australia, and elsewhere.
The questions posed by History and Psyche, then, have become traditional
ones, but to these old questions this collection of perceptive and original
chapters offers some new, interesting, and persuasive answers. One group
of chapters, the largest, is concerned with the history of the psychoanalytic
movement. Other contributions discuss psychoanalytical approaches to cul-
ture and society and the uses of psychoanalysis in the study of the past.
The first group of histories might be described as intellectual histories of
a relatively orthodox kind, concerned, like other intellectual histories, with
the rise of a discipline (or in Lyndal Roper’s case, with attitudes to what we
call “psychology” before it became a discipline). They examine the inter-
nal development of psychoanalysis, discussing both Freud and disciples
such as G. Stanley Hall in the United States (Pamela Thurschwell) and pay-
ing particular attention to his followers in Britain, among them W. H. R.
Rivers (John Forrester), Wilfred Bion (Michael Roper) and D. W. Winnicott
(Sally Alexander), as well as the Stracheys and others who went abroad to
be analyzed (Laura Marcus). Incidentally, a leading historian, Lewis Namier,
belonged to this last group. In the 1920s, by which time he had become
British, he was analyzed in Vienna by Theodor Reik. Although Namier’s lec-
ture on the eighteenth-century politician Charles Townshend never men-
tions Freud or psychoanalysis, it is concerned with the making of an unstable,
self-destructive personality.19
In the manner of Eli Zaretsky, though more cautiously, some of these stud-
ies also place or replace this development in its social and cultural contexts.20
These contexts include Central European politics in the 1890s, especially the
crisis of Austrian liberalism (T. G. Ashplant) and of course World War I (John
Forrester and Michael Roper), which placed trauma and especially shell-shock
on the agenda of analysts, some of whom had soldiers as patients, like Rivers,
or experienced active service and even trauma themselves, as Bion did.
Diverging from the common practice of intellectual historians, Forrester and
Roper also examine the psychology of the psychologists themselves.
These chapters make insightful contributions to the growing body of work
on individual psychoanalysts. Let us hope that in the future they will be
Afterword 329
joined by studies that focus more sharply on groups, networks, and institu-
tions such as associations and journals. Such studies might also attempt to
describe and explain the notoriously fissile tendencies of the psychoanalytical
movement, similar in this respect to the histories of some religious sects and
political parties: the excommunication of Jung and Adler in the 1910s and
of Ferenczi and Rank in the 1920s, and the foundation of breakaway institu-
tions such as Horney’s Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis or
Lacan’s Société Française de Psychanalyse.
What led to this fragmentation? Should we seek the explanation in Freud’s
authoritarian personality, or in the content of his doctrines, which lacked
the ambiguities that might have held the movement together? Or should we
turn our attention from the founder to the followers? Why were a number of
strong, indeed awkward personalities attracted to Freud?
More of a challenge to traditional ways of writing history is the use of psy-
choanalytic concepts to study social groups or whole cultures as well as indi-
viduals or, as Peter Gay puts it, to “translate onto the social scene” concepts
that analysts generally use to understand individuals.21 As is well known,
Freud led the way in his late, speculative essays. The results were not always
convincing, as the notorious case of his study of Leonardo (discussed here
by Elizabeth Lunbeck) reminds us.22 The authors of the chapters in this col-
lection generally avoid following the master in this direction, preferring to
discuss the reception of Freud’s ideas, their impact on artists such as Jackson
Pollock and art critics such as Anton Ehrenzweig (Alex Potts) and also on the
British Welfare State, which “created new registers of psychological expres-
sion” (Rhodri Hayward).
Is there a case for going beyond these limits? Among Freud’s late essays,
Das Unbehagen der Kultur, known in English as Civilization and its Discontents,
revealed its potential for cultural and social historians when it inspired
the classic study by Norbert Elias on the civilizing process and the rise of
self-control.23 Criticizing and also building on the work of Elias, some histo-
rians have gone further in this direction, especially in the study of the emo-
tions, memory, and the imagination. As her “ego-histoire” in this collection
reminds us, Luisa Passerini has made contributions in all three areas, on the
history of love, on popular memories of Fascism, and on the ways in which
Mussolini was represented and imagined.
As was noted earlier, the history of the emotions has recently become a
central topic for research. Scholars have focused on the ways in which emo-
tions such as anger, fear, or love have been represented, managed, or (as some
would say) constructed in different cultures and in different periods. Again,
the study of memory, including what is variously known as “social,” “collec-
tive,” or “cultural” memory is also enjoying a kind of boom, for reasons that
surely deserve the attention of psychoanalysts as well as historians.24 At least
some of the historians working in this field admit their debt to Freud, among
them the French scholar Henry Rousso. Rousso’s remarkable study of what
he calls the “Vichy syndrome” charts the ways in which the French have
remembered or refused to remember their defeat by the Germans in World
330 Peter Burke
War II and the collaboration of many of them with the occupying forces,
drawing on psychiatry and psychoanalysis for metaphors (as he calls them)
such as collective trauma, psychodrama, and even therapy.25
Psychoanalysis has also made a contribution to historical method. For exam-
ple, oral historians no longer accept, more or less uncritically, the accounts of
past experience given by the people they interview. A few of them have inter-
viewed the same people and asked them the same questions decades later, thus
revealing the way in which memories are mythologized over the years.26 In
other words, historians now recognize that the frontier between memory and
imagination, whether individual or collective, is an open one, a point that also
applies to autobiographies (Katharine Hodgkin). The history of the collective
imagination, or “imaginary” (in French, l’imaginaire social ), is another topic in
which interest has been increasing in the last few decades. Traditional topics,
from feudalism to witchcraft or from the middle class to the Balkans, have
been studied from this angle.27 Studies of the imagination can hardly neglect,
and indeed have not neglected, the role of the unconscious and the evidence
of dreams. A few historians, among them leaders of the profession such as
Jacques Le Goff and Reinhart Koselleck, wrote about the history of dreams in
the 1970s, in Le Goff’s case explicitly from a Freudian point of view. 28 Interest
in the topic has recently revived.29 Dreams might appear to be inescapably
individual, and they do offer important evidence for biographers (as Forrester’s
analysis of Rivers’s dreams suggests), but they also respond to shared political
situations, such as the rise of the Third Reich, and as some anthropologists
have noted, dreams are shaped by the culture of the dreamer.30
In short, what Peter Gay calls the “corner” joining psychoanalysis and his-
tory has indeed become a little larger, so that this book appears at a favora-
ble moment. The “Psychoanalysis and History” seminar at the University of
London, the Oxford seminar on the same topic, and the journal with the
same title, launched in 1998, are all helping “to strengthen the links between
the two disciplines” (as the journal’s first editorial proclaimed). Like the semi-
nars and the journal, History and Psyche both makes and marks another step
in what has turned out to be an uphill climb: the slow reception of historical
psychology in general and of psychoanalysis in particular by the community
of historians. It is therefore extremely welcome.
Notes
1. S. Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture,” in P. Parker and D. Quint,
eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Cf. Hodgkin in note 10.
2. On Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life as an example of the use of details as clues,
see C. Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Verso, 1990). Contrast M. Shepherd,
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr Freud (London: Tavistock, 1985).
3. J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919; English translation, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), especially 1–29.
4. L. Febvre, “Histoire et psychologie” (1938) and “La sensibilité et l’histoire” (1941): rpt
Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), 207–238; Norbert Elias,
Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (1939), English translation The Civilizing Process (revised
Afterword 331
edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). The interview quoted in Elias, Au-delà de Freud (Paris:
La découverte, 2010), 7–8.
5. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1951); J. H. van den Berg, Metabletica (1956), translated as The Changing Nature of Man:
Introduction to a Historical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1961); E. Erikson, Young Man
Luther (New York: Norton, 1958).
6. W. L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review 63 (1958), 283–304, at
284.
7. B. Mazlish, ed., Psychoanalysis and History (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963);
R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965).
8. Z. Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (London: Routledge, 1960); E. R. Dodds, Pagan
and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
9. A. Besançon, “Histoire et psychanalyse,” Annales E. S. C. 19 (1964), 237–49. Cf. id.,
Le Tsarévitch immolé: la symbolique de la loi dans la culture russe (Paris: Plon, 1967).
10. G. Devereux, “La psychanalyse et l’histoire: une application à l’histoire de Sparte,”
Annales E.S.C. 20 (1965), 18–44.
11. A. Besançon, “L’inconscient,” in J. Le Goff, ed., Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
1974), vol. 3; B. Mazlish, “What is Psycho-History?” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 21 (1971), 79–99; M. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Julliard, 1970);
“Psychanalyse et histoire,” rpt Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris:
Gallimard, 1987), 97–117; S. Friedländer, Histoire et psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1975);
L. DeMause, ed., The New Psychohistory (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1975).
12. H.-U. Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,”
Historische Zeitschrift 208 (1969), 529–554; cf. id., “Geschichte und Psychanalyse,” in
his Geschichte als Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1973), 85–123.
13. J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974);
D. Stannard, Shrinking History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); F. Manuel,
“The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” Daedalus (1971), 187–210; F. Weinstein
and G. M. Platt, “The Coming Crisis in Psychohistory,” Journal of Modern History 47
(1975), 202–238.
14. C. E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American
Historical Review 78 (1973), 328–347.
15. D. Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York: Basic Books, 1970); P. Greven, The
Protestant Temperament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); S. Friedländer,
L’antisemitisme nazi (Paris: Seuil, 1971); J. Delumeau, La peur en occident (Paris: Hachette,
1978); T. Zeldin, France 1848–1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973–77),
later retitled A History of French Passions; Certeau, La possession de Loudun.
16. P. N. Stearns and C. Z. Stearns, “Emotionology,” American Historical Review 90 (1986),
813–836; C. Z. Stearns and P. N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in
America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); P. N. Stearns, Jealousy:
The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press,
1989).
17. P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, 4 vols (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984–98); H. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987); L. Passerini,
Mussolini imaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991); id., Europe in Love, Love in Europe (New
York: Berghahn, 1999); L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
18. W. M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
offers a framework for future histories. Collective studies include C. Benthien Anne
Fleig, and Ingrid Kasten. eds., Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle (Cologne: Böhlau,
2000); P. Gouk and H. Hills, eds., Representing Emotions (Aldershot: Palgrave, 2005);
K. Herding and A. Krause Wahl, eds., Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen: Emotionen in
Nahsicht (Berlin: Driesen, 2007); J. A. Steiger, ed., Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der
frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005).
19. L. B. Namier, Charles Townshend: His Character and Career (Cambridge: Cambridge
332 Peter Burke
20. E. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul (New York: Knopf, 2004).

21. P. Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 7.
22. M. Schapiro, “Leonardo and Freud,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956), 147–178.
23. Elias, Civilizing Process.
24. J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); A. Assmann,
Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck,
1999); David Blight, “The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now?” in P. Boyer and J. V.
Wertsch, eds., Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 238–251.
25. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy.
26. J. Peneff, “Myths in Life Stories,” in R. Samuel and P. Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live
By (London: Routledge, 1990), 36–48.
27. G. Duby, Les trois ordres, ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); R. Briggs,
“Witchcraft and the Early Modern Imagination,” Folklore 115 (2004), 259–272; L. Roper,
“Witchcraft and the Western Imagination,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
16 (2006), 117–141; D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation
of Class in Britain c1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28. J. Le Goff, “Les rêves dans la culture et la psychologie collective de l’occident médiéval,”
Scolies 1 (1971), 123–130, English translation in his Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 201–204; R. Koselleck, “Terror and Dream,” in
his Futures Past (English translation Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985), 213–230. Cf. P. Burke,
“L’histoire sociale des rêves,” Annales E.S.C. 28 (1973), 329–342.
29. D. Pick and L. Roper, eds., Dreams and History (London: Routledge, 2004); R. Po-chia
Hsia, “Dreams and Conversions: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Buddhist
Dreams in Ming and Qing China,” Journal of Religious History 29, (2010) 223–240.;
K. Hodgkin, M. O’Callaghan, and S. Wiseman, eds., Reading the Early Modern Dream
(London: Routledge, 2008).
30. C. Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traumes (Munich: Beck, 1966); G. E. von Grunebaum
and R. Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1966).
Contributors
Sally Alexander is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths

University of London and a founder editor of History Workshop Journal. Her
publications include Becoming a Woman, Essays in 19th and 20thc Feminist
History (1995) and Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War, edited with Jim
Fyrth (1991 and 2008).
T. G. Ashplant was formerly Professor of Social and Cultural History at
Liverpool John Moores University, England. His research interests include
the historical construction of masculinity, and its relationship to class and
political identities; and the expression of historical subjectivities through
life-writings. He is the author of Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class and
Politics in Britain, 1900–30 (2007), and an editor of the European Journal of
Life-Writing.
Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History at Cambridge until his retire-
ment and remains a fellow of Emmanuel College. He has a long-standing
interest in the relation between history and other disciplines.
John Forrester is Professor of History and Philosophy of the Sciences in the
University of Cambridge, author of Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis
(1980), The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (1990), Freud’s Women (with Lisa
Appignanesi; 1992), Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997), and Truth Games
(1997). He is completing (with Laura Cameron) Freud in Cambridge, a study
of the reception of psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the 1920s. He is inter-
ested in reasoning in cases in science, medicine, and law. He is the editor of
Psychoanalysis and History.
Rhodri Hayward is Wellcome Award Lecturer in the History of Medicine
at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published on the history of
dreams, Pentecostalism, demonology, cybernetics, and the relations between
psychiatry and primary care. His current research examines the rise and
political implications of psychiatric epidemiology in modern Britain. Resisting
History: Popular Religion and the Invention of the Unconscious was published in
2007, and he has recently completed a second book, Self Cures, on the rela-
tionship between psychology and medicine in modern Britain.
Katharine Hodgkin teaches at the University of East London. Her research
is primarily on seventeenth-century England, and she has written on topics
333
334 Contributors
including witchcraft, dreams, and madness in this period. Her publications

include Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (2006) and Women,
Madness and Sin: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (2010).
Elizabeth Lunbeck is the Nelson Tyrone, Jr Professor of History and Professor
of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Psychiatric
Persuasion and the coeditor of several books, most recently, with Lorraine
Daston, of Histories of Scientific Observation (2011). She is currently finishing
The Americanization of Narcissism.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature and a fellow
of New College at Oxford University. She has published widely on topics in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including modern-
ism, film, and the history of psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is The
Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007).
Luisa Passerini has been Professor of Cultural History at the University of
Turin. She is currently external Professor of History at the European University
Institute, Florence, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.
Among her books are Europe in Love, Love in Europe. Imagination and Politics
in Britain between the Wars (1999 and 2000) and Women and Men in Love.
European Identities in the Twentieth Century (2009 and 2012).
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer. His most recent book is Missing
Out: in Praise of the Unlived Life (2012). He is also the author, with Barbara
Taylor, of On Kindness (2009).
Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in the Department of History of
Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of the books Flesh
and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994 and 2000) and
The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000). His new
book, Experiments in Modern Realism: world making, politics and the everyday in
postwar European and American art, will be published in spring 2013. He is a
member of the History Workshop Journal editorial collective.
Lyndal Roper teaches at Oxford University, where she is the first woman
Regius Professor of History. Her books include Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy
in Baroque Germany (2004), and she is currently writing a biography of Luther.
She is a member of the History Workshop Journal editorial collective.
Michael Roper is a social and cultural historian of twentieth-century Britain,
based in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. His book The
Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War was published by Manchester
University Press in 2009 and he has published numerous articles on personal
sources and the use of psychoanalysis in historical research on subjectivity.
He has a particular interest in the Kleinian psychoanalyst and World War I
veteran Wilfred Bion, and is currently working on a history of “the genera-
tion between” in Britain, which explores the psychological impact of World
War I on the children of veterans.
Contributors 335
Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. He is the author of five

books of intellectual history, including Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation
and Freedom in Freud (1987 and 1995). His most recent book is Memory, Trauma
and History: Essays on Living With the Past (2011).
Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.
Her publications include Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination
(2003), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (with Sarah Knott, 2005), and On
Kindness (with Adam Phillips, 2009). She is a member of the History Workshop
Journal editorial collective.
Pamela Thurschwell is a senior lecturer in the School of English at the
University of Sussex and the author of Sigmund Freud (2000) and Literature,
Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (2001). Her current project is on
the temporalities of adolescence in the first half of the twentieth century in
Britain and America.
Index
Note: Publications can be found under author names. Page numbers in italics denote
illustrations.
Abraham, Karl 105, 106, 110, 111 Arrighi, Andrea 323n84

Abstract Expressionism 265, 267, 268, art informel see Abstract Expressionism
275, 281n39 Austro-Hungarian Empire
see also drip paintings and anti-Semitism 29, 30–1, 32, 38
abuse see sexual abuse and position of Jews in society 28–31,
Ackerknecht, Erwin 97 47n101
action painting 273 autobiographical writing 241–2, 244–5,
adolescence 173–5, 177, 178–80, 181–3, 258–9, 262n25, 317–18
188, 190n9 about childhood 248–9, 254–7, 259
and anxiety/depression 164 spiritual 245–6, 247, 256
and rebellion 34, 35, 173, 174, 177, 189 see also manuscript autobiographies
relationship with parents 37 autoerotism 49, 59, 60
and sexual development 132, 158,
176–7, 181–2, 189 Bakhtin, Mikhail 309
adolescent patients 175–6, 184–5, 186–7 Bálint, Michael 307
Adorno, Theodor 16, 25n11, 305 Barbu, Zevedei: Problems of Historical
Agricola, Johannes 229, 230 Psychology 326
Aichhorn, August: Wayward Youth 174 Barker, Pat: Regeneration Trilogy,
Albieri, Donna 52, 53 The 72–3, 82
anthropology 72, 92, 93–4, 96, 97 Barraclough, Geoffrey 327
antiessentialism 198 Bartholomew, A. T. 101n42
anti-Semitism 6, 7, 23, 29–31, 32, 38, 39 Bartlett, Frederick 83–4
impact on Freud’s life 30–1, 36 Barzun, Jacques: Clio and the Doctors 327
Luther’s 223 Basaglia, Franco 305–6
and threat to Jewish masculinity 36–7 behavioral psychology 221
in Viennese politics 30, 31 Belotti, Elena Gianini 306
see also Nazism Berger, John 281n50
anxiety 285–6, 289–90 Berlin
workers suffering from 285–8, 289, 295 psychoanalytic communities in 105,
see also psychotic anxiety 110, 113
anxiety neuroses 285, 288, 289 Psychoanalytic Institute 106, 107, 117
preventative measures 294–5 social life/sexual freedoms experienced
and psychosomatic disorders 289, 290, 291 in 58, 66n70, 111, 112, 116, 118
relating to war 288, 289–90, 293 Bernays, Minna 57
in the workplace 286–8, 290 Besançon, Alain 326, 328
337
338 Index
Bevan, Aneurin 293–4 Torres Straits Expedition (1898) 72, 92,

Bion, Wilfred 129–33, 138–40, 141–2, 94, 97, 100n3
146n67, 146n72, 328 capitalism 223, 224, 226, 277, 292
career as an psychoanalyst 130, 132, failures of 290
133–4, 137–8, 142 castration complex 37, 39, 120
“nameless dread,” concept of 134–5 see also Oedipus complex
publications: All My Sins Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 277–8
Remembered 132, 135, 139, Certeau, Michel de 326, 327, 328
144n16; “Amiens” 136–7; “Diary, Chadwick, Mary 107, 108, 112, 113, 114,
France” 129, 131–2, 133, 136; 117, 118, 119, 159
Long Weekend, The 132, 135, 137, Charcot, Jean-Martin 31, 32
143, 144n16; Memoir of the Future, child abuse see sexual abuse
A 132, 135, 143, 144n16; “The Other child health 154, 155
Side of Genius” 138; “A Theory of see also pediatric medicine
Thinking” 134 child medicine see pediatric medicine
“reverie,” concept of 134, 137–8, 139, child psychoanalysis 107, 112, 113, 153,
140, 141, 142, 143 159, 160–1, 164–5, 170n76, 171n87,
war experiences 130–1, 133, 135–6, 174–5, 221
145n28 Child Study movement (1890s) 177,
Book of Margery Kempe 262n25 190n12
Bora, Katharina von 230 childhood 55, 174–5, 180, 221, 249, 254
Bowlby, John 2, 130, 153, 169n52, 293, and autobiographical writing 248–9,
294, 306 254–7, 259
Breuer, Josef 44n34, 175 and memory 52, 57, 247–9, 254–6, 259,
Brierley, Marjorie 107 309–11
Brill, A. A. 105 and notion of original sin 254–5, 256
British Psychoanalytic Society 58, 106–7, see also adolescence; child
133, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160, 165, 170n77 psychoanalysis; children;
Britton, Clare 153, 161 pediatric medicine
Brown, Norman O. 220, 223–4 children
Life Against Death (1959) 4, 19, 223 discipline of 251–2, 254, 264n38
Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) 108, and education 113, 154, 177, 181, 183,
109, 113, 114 190n12, 263n31, 264n43
Development 115 emotional development of 153, 179, 183,
and gender identity 115–16, 117–18 204, 221
letters 114, 115, 117–18, 126n37 relationships: with father 173, 252, 254;
novels 114–15 with mother 54, 56, 137, 149–51, 152,
relationship with Hans Sachs 108, 114, 165–6, 252, 254, 270
115, 116–17, 118–19 sexual development of 40, 51, 115, 173
undergoing analysis 116–17 see also castration complex;
Burckhardt, Jacob: Civilization of the Oedipus complex
Renaissance in Italy 242 sibling relationships 56, 247–8, 249,
250–1, 252, 254
Calvin, John 224, 225 see also child psychoanalysis;
Cambridge Magazine, the 78–9, 80, 81, 82, childhood; pediatric medicine
84, 86, 101n42 Children’s Act (1948) 153
Cambridge University Cicero 21
and anthropology studies 93–4, 96 circumcision 39, 46n83
Index 339
Clark University (Worcester, USA) 174, distancing techniques 39, 41, 161, 212–13,
178, 184, 190n12 215–17
Classical culture/symbolism 33, 49, 59, Dodds, E. R.
114, 122, 233 Age of Anxiety, The 326
see also Oedipus complex Greeks and the Irrational 326
clinics 106–7, 149, 159, 171n80 Donne, John 260n3
mother and child 151, 157, 162–3, 164, Doolittle, Hilda see H.D.
165–6, 167n13, 168n13 dreams 7, 32, 73, 76–9, 81, 82–3, 91,
Close Up (journal) 114 119–20, 123, 210n68, 314,
Cochlaeus, Johannes 221, 228–33 322n56, 330
Historia (1549) 228, 229, 236n9 drip paintings 265, 266, 269–70, 272
Secret Dialogue of the Tragedy of see also action painting
Johann Huss, A (1538) 229–30, Dubuffet, Jean 266, 276, 277–8
232, 233, 239n60 painting method 275–6
Seven-Headed Luther 228 paintings: Paris Circus (series) 275, 277;
collective imagination 330 Rue Pifre 275, 277
collective memory 310, 311–12, 315, Durbin, Evan 294–5
321n42, 329–30 Politics of Democratic Socialism, The 292–3
collective unconscious 313–14, 322n47
Collingwood, R. G. 200–1, 209n40 eating disorders 164
compensation see worker compensation Eck, Johann 226, 228, 231
schemes Eder, David 105–6, 160
“Controversial Discussions,” the 153, 159, ego 23, 56, 83, 95, 161, 171n87, 195,
160–1, 171n87, 175 225, 312
Coronation Bus Strike (1937) 291 ego-histoire (Passerini) 3, 317, 318–19, 329
courtly love 316 Ehrenzweig, Anton 265, 272–3
Hidden Order of Art, The 270, 271
Darwin, Charles 151, 156, 169n52 Einfühlung 200, 209n46
Davis, Philip 211 Elias, Norbert: Civilizing Process, The
Dean, Carolyn 202–3 (1939) 226, 325–6, 327
defense mechanisms 39, 41, 161, 212–13, Ellerman, Annie Winifred see Bryher
215–17 Ellis, Havelock 49, 66n73, 114, 115
deferred action 214–15, 216 empathy 158, 199–204, 205–6, 208n29,
Deleuze, Gilles 285 210n64
Delumeau, Jean 328 Enlightenment, the 14–16, 25n11
DeMause, Lloyd 326 and Stoicism 20–1, 23
Dent, Edward 101n42 envy 161–2, 166–7, 225, 232
depression 161, 163–4, 237n36, 288, 295 and Martin Luther 225–6, 232
see also anxiety; paranoid-schizophrenia; and sibling relationships 250–1
schizophrenia see also “penis-envy”
Derrida, Jacques 196 Erikson, Erik H. 220–1, 222
Deutsch, Helene 121 and fatherhood theme 222, 2
Devereux, George 326 heritage/identity of: German 220–1,
Diderot, Denis 15–16 222, 223; Jewish 223, 236n7
diffusionism 94, 95, 97 Young Man Luther (1958) 4, 220–3,
see also evolutionism 224, 234, 326
Dilthey, Wilhelm 201 essentialism 5, 182, 189, 243
displacement 75, 95, 213, 309, 310, 311 ethnology 88–9, 94–6
340 Index
Evans, Arthur 123 childhood/adolescence of 28–9, 30,

evolutionism 92–3, 94, 177, 179, 188, 189 56–7
see also diffusionism and deferred action 214–16
dreams/dream analysis 73, 77, 83–4, 86,
Fachinelli, Elvio 306, 319n2 121–2; “Rome dreams” 33
fascism 108, 114, 224–5, 233, 234, 311 and empathy 201
and memory 308–9, 315 and Enlightenment thought 15–16, 20
see also collective memory on female sexuality 120–1, 123–4,
father-child relationships 15, 37, 40, 156–7 175–6
conflict within 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, free clinics 159, 171n80
222, 257 Hannibal, identification with 9, 29, 33,
and Oedipal theory 34, 40–1, 54, 56, 57 37, 47n104
fatherhood 151, 152, 222, 233 on homosexuality 37, 50, 51–3, 58,
see also father-child relationships 59–60, 61, 175–6
Febvre, Lucien 197, 325 and Jewish identity 23, 27, 28–9, 30, 34,
feminism/feminist thought 5, 197 36, 37–9
attitudes to child development 306 joke-work/joke-technique 309
attitudes to motherhood/maternal Library of Congress exhibition on
bodies 154, 166, 307, 311 13–14
discussions on eroticism and on narcissism 49, 50, 54–5, 56, 59,
sexuality 307 62, 63, 120
and psychoanalysis 3, 306, 319n10 on neuroses 73, 74, 75, 88, 94, 285,
Fenichel, Otto 62 289, 295
Ferenczi, Sándor 51, 61, 105, 178, 201, 307 Oedipus complex 28, 33–4, 35–6, 37,
field of play (Winnicott) 204 38, 39–41, 42, 55, 56, 58, 96, 160,
Field, Joanna see Milner, Marion 161, 173–4, 176–7, 182
Firestone, Shulamith 306 publications: “A Case of Female
First World War see World War I Homosexuality” 175–6; Civilization
Fliess, Wilhelm 37, 45n67, 50, 51–2 and its Discontents 15, 16, 329; Future
Flügel, J. C. 61–2 of an Illusion, The 15; Interpretation of
Forbes, Mansfield 98 Dreams, The 28, 29, 32, 33, 87, 157;
Foucault, Michel 5, 196, 198, 261n13 Moses and Monotheism 21–2, 23, 42;
Frankfurt School, the 224, 234, 305 “On Narcissism” 62, 120; “On the
free association 74–5, 122, 160–1, 309, 310 Sexual Theories of Children” 120;
Freud for Historians (Gay) 6–7, 17, 18 Three Essays on the Theory of
Freud, Amalia 37 Sexuality 173, 176, 182; Totem
Freud, Anna 20, 113, 173, 175, 213 and Taboo 17, 21, 189
“Adolescence” 173 relationships: with father 28, 29, 32, 33,
see also “Controversial Discussions,” the 34, 35, 38, 47n104; with mother 37,
Freud, Jakob 28, 29–30, 33, 34 38, 41, 56–7
Freud, Sigmund 1, 13, 15–16, 97–8 screen-memory 309, 310
and anti-Semitism 30–2, 36, 37–9 seduction theory 34, 35, 37, 41, 55
and anxiety 285, 289, 295 and self-distancing techniques 212–13
atheism of 15, 16, 21–2, 30 studies on Leonardo da Vinci 50–1,
case studies: “Dora” (Ida Bauer) 35, 57, 63
46n94, 160, 175–6; Lanzer, suicide of 20, 21, 23
Ernst (“Rat Man”) 40, 46n98; Freudianism 6, 15–16, 77, 99, 178,
Wolfman 214 198, 227 see also Freud, Sigmund
Index 341
Friedländer, Saul 326, 328 publications: “Advent” 119, 121, 124;

Fromm, Erich Tribute to Freud 109, 119, 121; “Writing
Escape from Freedom 224–6 on the Wall” 119, 121, 122, 124
writing on Calvin 224, 225 undergoing analysis 117, 118–20,
writing on fascism 224–5, 226, 233, 234 121, 122–3
writing on Luther 224, 225–6, 233 Head, Henry 86, 99
health 151, 152, 157, 166, 306
Gay, Peter 14, 16–18, 327, 328 of workforce 290, 291–2, 293
and Enlightenment thought 14–16, see also child health; public health
20–1, 24 services; psychosomatic disorders
experiencing psychoanalysis 19–20 health services see public health services
and Freud/Freudianism 15–18, 21, 23 Hecker, Ewald 285
publications: Freud for Historians 6–7, hero-worship 221
17, 18; Life for Our Time, A 13, 15 Herzl, Theodor 37
Geertz, Clifford 196 heterosexual relationships 60, 61, 62
gender identity 36, 115 heterosexuality 36, 37, 60, 61, 62, 63
gender transformation 115–16 and femininity 177
Gilman, Sander 328 and masculinity 39
Glover, Edward 106, 107, 161 and Oedipal theory 37, 176–7, 182
Glover, James 106 historical scholarship
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15, 56, 65n43 and empathy 205–6, 208n29
Goffman, Erving: Asylums 306 and oral history 308–11
gossip 109 and subjectivity 1, 4–5, 7, 195–6,
Graves, Robert 81 200–1, 202, 205–6, 210n70, 234–5,
Greek and Roman mythology see Classical 243–4, 283, 317, 327
culture/symbolism and use of psychoanalytic theory 3–8,
Greenblatt, Stephen 196, 242 17–18, 149, 150–1
Groddeck, Georg 306–7 “History Workshop” 2–3
Gross, Frieda 105 history-taking 152, 163–4, 165, 211–12
group dynamics 22 Hitler, Adolf 224, 225, 234
see also Nazism
Haddon, Alfred Cort 93 Hoerl, Ottmar 219
Haeckel, Ernst 179, 190n23 Hofstadter, Richard: Paranoid Style in
Hall, G. Stanley 177–80, 328 American Politics 326
case studies 184–7, 188–9 Holocaust, the 202, 203, 236n7
publications: Adolescence 174, 177–8, homosexual relationships 61–2, 63, 88,
178–80, 181, 183, 187, 188; “A 107, 108, 120–1
Medium in the Bud” 174, 184, 186 see also homosexuality; lesbianism;
relationship with/admiration for queer theory
Freud 178, 181 homosexuality 1, 36, 37, 58, 61–2
and spiritualism 184–9 and feminization of Jewish men 31,
theories of sexual development during 36–7
puberty 181–3, 187–8, 189 Freudian theories on 5, 52–5, 57,
Halliday, James 290 59–60, 61
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 6, 108–9, and narcissism 49–50, 59–60, 62–3
113–14, 121 theories on origins of 58, 60
letters and notebooks 109, 118–19, 120, see also lesbianism
121, 125, 126n37 Horkheimer, Max 16, 25n11, 305
342 Index
Horney, Karen 121 Joyce, Patrick 207n13, 207n17

Hug-Helmuth, Hermine 170n76 Jung, Carl 51, 60–1, 64n22, 174, 178,
Huizinga, Johan: Autumn of the Middle 184, 187, 268, 312, 313–14
Ages, The 325 Role of the Unconscious, The 314
Hunt, Lynn 207n20, 327, 328 Jungism 268, 312–13, 315
hysteria 31, 32, 33, 44n34, 249, 289–90
Keynes, John Maynard 292
Imago 107–8 Klein, Melanie 107, 111, 133, 138, 152,
individualism 195–6, 242, 243, 244, 161–2, 270, 273, 280n16, 315
262n19 and child psychoanalysis 112–13, 159,
industrial disputes and compensation 160–1, 271
claims 286–7 see also ‘Controversial Discussions’, the
psychiatric support/care 290, 291–2 Kohut, Heinz 201
psychosomatic symptoms 290–1 Kohut, Heinz 201, 202, 306
Institute of Psychoanalysis see British Koselleck, Reinhart 330
Psychoanalytic Society
International Psycho-Analytic Congress, Labour movement (post WWI) 82
Salzburg (1908) 105 Labour Party (Great Britain) 82
Isaacs, Susan 107, 159, 170n76 welfare legislation/policies 154–5, 291,
Isham, Elizabeth 246–8 292, 293–5
Booke of Rememberance 246–8, 249–50, Lacan, Jacques 40, 198, 208n22, 312,
251–3, 256–7 315, 316
childhood, memories of 247–8, 249, LaCapra, Dominick: History in Transit 203
254–6, 251–2, 264n38 Laing, Ronald D.: Divided Self, The 305
memory text manuscript 246, 257–8, 259 Langer, William L. 326
relationship with parents 246, 249–50, Lanzer, Ernst (“Rat Man”) 40, 46n98
252–3, 257, 264n40 Laplanche, Jean 213–14, 312
relationship with siblings 247, 248, laughter 308–9
249, 250, 251, 256–7 Layard, John 89
Le Goff, Jacques 330
Jackson, Hughlings 98 leadership 219, 221, 224–5, 234
Jacques, Eliot 303n91 see also Nazism
James, William 184 Lemnius, Simon 231
Jews 21, 31, 38, 46n80 Leonardo da Vinci 52, 55
assimilation 29–30, 36–7, 38 Freud’s work on 50–4, 55, 57, 63
changing position in Austro-Hungarian and homosexuality 1, 50, 51, 52–3
Empire 18, 28–31, 47n101 relationship with his mother/
Freud’s theories on religious origins of 21–2 stepmother 52, 53–4, 55, 57
and monotheism 21 lesbianism 107, 108, 115, 120–1, 175–6
and queer theory 36–7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 93
see also anti-Semitism Lewis, M. G. 112
jokes 308–9 liberalism 16–17
Jones, Ernest 105, 118, 121 Austrian 30, 41, 43n2
and the British Institute of crisis of 32, 34, 41, 43n2, 328
Psychoanalysis 157, 170n77 and position of Jews in society 29–31, 34
and child/adolescent analysis 160, 173 Life and Letters To-day 114
and Freud 50–1, 106, 110 linguistic turn 4, 5, 197, 207n11,
relationship with W. H. R. Rivers 84, 98 207n20, 234
Index 343
literary criticism 242–3 and fascism 308–9, 315

London Psychoanalytic Society see British and oral history 308–12
Psychoanalytic Society and spirituality 260n3, 260n4
Low, Barbara 107, 114, 159 and the unconscious 310–11, 312
Lueger, Karl 32 see also collective memory;
Luther, Martin 1, 7, 221 screen-memory; subjectivity
and anality 223–4 memory palace 257–8
and animal rhetoric 222, 223, 235n1, Mendel, Gregor 180
239n53 Milner, Marion 201
attitude to sex and marriage 225, 227, On Not Being Able to Paint 201,
230, 232, 238n41 270–1, 280n18
biographies of 4, 219–23, 224, 226–8, Moeller, Bernd: Imperial Cities and the
229–33, 236n14, 326 Reformation (1972) 226
friendships 225, 228 Morris, Jerry 290
leadership of 219, 225 mother-child relationships 54, 56, 134,
personality 219–20, 221, 225–6, 228, 137, 141, 149–51, 152, 165–6, 171n87,
237n36, 237n43 204, 252, 254, 270
physicality of 223, 225, 227, 232 feminist studies of 154, 166, 307, 311
portraits of 219, 228, 230 mother-son relationships 1, 52, 53–6,
rivalries/enemies 221, 228, 230–2 57, 59–60
and theme of fatherhood 222 and theories about homosexuality 41,
50, 53, 54–6, 57–8, 59–60
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 199, 200, see also Oedipus complex
212, 213, 215, 216 Murray, Jessie 106
Macpherson, Kenneth 114, 117 Musatti, Cesare 305
Malinowski, Bronisław 96–7, 103n87 Mussolini, Benito 309, 311–12, 313, 329
Argonauts of the Western Pacific 92 Myers, Charles Samuel 73, 93, 94,
Manuel, Frank 327 98–9, 100n9
manuscript autobiographies 245–6
Martino, Ernesto De 320n19 Nachtraglichkeit 214–15, 216
martyrdom 228, 233 Namier, Lewis 328
Marxism 197, 224, 305 narcissism 49, 54, 59
Mascuch, Michael: Origins of the and homosexuality 49–50, 59–60, 62–3
Individualist Self 262n19 National Health Insurance Act (1911) 286
Mass Observation social research National Health Service 154, 163
organization 155 see also public health services
Maternal and Child Welfare Act 167n13 Nazism 21, 109, 226, 234, 314, 322n56
Mazlish, Bruce 8n12, 9n13, 326 neo-atavisim 179, 180, 188
Mazlish, Bruce: Psychoanalysis and History 326 neurasthenia 287, 288
Medico-Psychological Clinic, London 106, neuroses 37, 88, 91, 287, 288, 290, 293
107, 159, 160, 171n80 see also anxiety neuroses; war neuroses
Melanchthon, Philip 220, 225, 228, 230, new historicism 196, 243
236n14 Nietzsche, Friedrich 213, 216
memory 7, 241 Nunberg, Herman 62
and autobiographical writing 241–2,
247, 255, 256–8, 316–18 object relations theory 2, 62, 162, 265,
and childhood 52, 57, 247–9, 254–6, 270, 273–4, 280n16
259, 309–11 Oedipal theory see Oedipus complex
344 Index
Oedipus complex 28, 33–4, 35–6, 37, 38, puberty 176–7, 181, 190n9
39–41, 42, 55, 56, 58, 96, 160, 161, public health services 2, 151, 167n13,
173–4, 227 286, 293
and adolescence 176–7, 182 see also clinics; welfare provision (Britain)
Ogden, C. K. 78, 81, 96
Ongaro, Franca 305–6 queer theory 28, 176
oral history 4, 211, 212, 308–12, 330 and Jewish men 36, 37
Paddington Green Children’s Hospital Rabus, Ludwig 233

Winnicott’s clinic 162–3, 164, 165–6, Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 97, 103n87
168n13 Andaman Islanders, The 92, 97
painters/painting 1, 266, 270–1, 273–4, Ramsey, Frank 112
276 Rank, Otto 49
abstract 266, 269–70 “Rat Man” see Lanzer, Ernst
see also Abstract Expressionism recapitulation theory 174, 179, 180, 181, 189
and the unconscious 265–6, 268–9, Reformation, the 220, 221, 227–8, 234
271, 273 see also drip paintings and sexual identities 230, 231
Pankhurst, Sylvia 166 and witchcraft 232, 261n16
paranoid-schizophrenia 271–2, 273 Reich, Wilhelm 288, 306–7
“participant observation” 88, 89, 92 Reiter, Paul: Martin Luthers Umwelt, Charakter
Payne, Sylvia 107 und Psychose . . . (1941) 237n36
pediatric medicine 151, 152, 154, relationships
157, 162–4 father-child 15, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37,
“penis-envy” 120–1, 154 40–1, 54, 56, 57, 156–7, 222, 257
Penrose, Lionel 112 heterosexual 60, 61, 62
Phillips, Mark Salber 199, 212, 213, homosexual 61–2, 63, 88, 107, 108, 120–1
216, 217 mother-child 54, 56, 134, 137, 141,
Platt, Gerald M. 327 149–51, 152, 165–6, 171n87, 204,
Pollock, Jackson 1, 265, 268–9, 274, 252, 254, 270
281n39 mother-son 1, 41, 50, 52, 53–6, 57–8,
and art critics 266, 267, 269 59–60
painting method 266–7, 274; and see also Oedipus complex
role of the unconscious 268–9, 272 “Renaissance individualism” 242, 243, 244
paintings: drip paintings 265, repression 7, 17, 102n54, 213
266, 269–70, 272; Full Fathom and experience of war 85–6
Five 269–70, 280n13; Portrait and memory 310
and a Dream 267–8, 267; sexual 61, 89, 91
representational 267–8, 267, 268–9 “reverie,” concept of (Bion) 134, 137–8,
under analysis 268 139, 140, 141, 142, 143
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 213–14, 312 revisionism 214–15
Portelli, Alessandro 312 Rickman, John 89, 98, 112, 132
preventative psychiatry 294–5 Rivers, W. H. R. 6, 71–2, 97, 98, 328
Psyche 96 criticisms of psychoanalysis 72, 96–7
psychobiography 220, 221, 234 dreams 74, 76–7, 79–80, 83, 86–7, 91,
“psychohistory” 3–4, 9n13, 320n18 92, 94–5; “Pacifist dream,” the 80–1,
psychosomatic disorders 289, 290, 291 82–3; “Presidency dream,” the 76–7,
psychotic anxiety 1–2, 134–5, 136, 79, 87, 101n23; “Reproachful letter,”
145n35, 145n46 the 87
Index 345
Dreams and Primitive Culture screen-memory 309, 310

(lecture) 95 Searl, Nina 107, 112, 159, 170n76
expeditions/fieldwork 72, 92, 93, 94, Second World War see World War II
97, 98 seduction theory 34, 35, 37, 41, 55, 65n44
“genealogical method” (W. H. R. see also Oedipus complex
Rivers) 93–4 self, the 206n2, 243–5, 259, 283
interest in Freud’s work 72, 73–5, see also autobiographical writing;
83–4, 94, 99 narcissism; selfhood; subjectivity
publications: Conflict and Dream 72, 75, selfhood 195–6, 198, 242, 244, 260n8
76, 77–8, 83, 91; History of Melanesian see also individualism
Society, The 94; Instinct and the self-love see narcissism
Unconscious 73, 75–6, 90 self-representation 258–9
relationships: with patients 87–8, see also autobiographical writing; self, the
89–90, 99; with Sassoon 81–2, 83, sex change see gender transformation
84–5, 89 sexual abuse 33, 37, 39, 41
self-analysis 74, 78, 79–80, 87, 91, 94–5, sexual instinct 91, 92, 98, 220, 227, 230,
99 231, 232, 233
sexual orientation 88, 89–90 sexuality
and sexuality/sexual instinct 89–92 and deferred action 215
and social anthropology 92–7 development in adolescents 176–7,
Riviere, Joan 107, 112 181–2, 183
relationship with Donald female 108, 120–1, 123–4, 154, 176–7,
Winnicott 159, 161, 162, 170n75 182, 307
Róheim, Géza 98, 106 Freud’s theories of 36, 45n60, 90, 120–1
Rolland, Romain 79 infantile 51, 72, 96
Rose, Nikolas 207n17 male 46n98, 182, 232
Rousso, Henry 329–30 and neuroses 90–2
Russell, Bertrand 77, 78, 85 see also heterosexuality; homosexuality;
Russo, Henry 327 lesbianism; Oedipus complex
Sharpe, Ella Freeman 107, 108, 112, 121
Sachs, Hanns 105, 106, 107–8, 111, 232 Shaw, David Gary 207n20
relationship with Bryher (Annie shell-shock 73, 106, 135, 287, 328
Winifred Ellerman) 108, 114, 115, sibling relationships 56, 247–8, 249,
116–17, 118–19 250–1, 252, 254
Sadger, Isidor Isaak 55–6, 60 Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture
St. Augustine 260n3, 261n32 (exhibition) 13–14
Confessions 248, 255, 256 Sinclair, May 106
Sassoon, Siegfried 72, 73, 81–2, 83, 84–5, Smith, Preserved 226–7, 232, 233, 325
89, 101n42 social anthropology 92–3
“Repression of War Experience” 85 see also anthropology
schizophrenia 135, 137, 142, 237n36 Spalatin, Georg 225, 227–8, 229, 230
see also paranoid-schizophrenia spiritualism 184–9, 191n49, 192n62
Schmideberg, Melitta and Walter 114 Starobinski, Jean 205, 206
School of Philosophical Practices, Stearns, Carol and Peter 327
Milan 318 Stedman Jones, Gareth 207n13
Schorske, Carl E. 6, 18, 27, 30, 32–3, 43n2 Steedman, Carolyn: Dust 205
Schur, Max 20 Stoicism 20–1, 23
Scott, Joan 207n13 Stokes, Adrian 265, 270, 273–4, 278–9
346 Index
Stopes, Marie 166, 167n13 Verstehen 200

Strachey, Alix and James 106, 110–12, 113, “Vichy Syndrome” 329–30
157–8, 170n64, 170n66 Vienna 18
subjectivity 195–6, 197–9, 259, 308 Freud’s life in 18, 30–1, 38, 125,
early modern 195, 242, 243–4, 246, 126n11, 220
260n8, 262n21 political landscape of 31, 32, 124, 125
and historical understanding 1, 4–5, 7, psychoanalytic community in 105, 106,
195–6, 200–1, 202, 205–6, 210n70, 108–9, 118, 119
234–5, 243–4, 283, 317, 327 Voltairean tradition 15, 23
see also autobiographical writing;
individualism Wallington, Nehemiah 262n26
suicide 58, 152, 164, 289 war neuroses 1–2, 72, 73–5, 85, 94, 287,
of Freud 20, 21, 23 288, 289
and Stoicism 21, 23 perceived causes of 91
super-ego 152, 161, 165, 171n87, 312 treatment of 74–5, 90
Surrealism 268 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 326
Suttie, Ian 290 Weinstein, Fred 327
Weissman, August 180
Tanner, Amy 184, 185 welfare provision (Britain) 2, 5, 149, 165,
Tansley, Arthur 112 284, 286, 288, 290, 291–2, 295
Tausk, Viktor 105 see also clinics
Taylor, Stephen 293, 294 welfare reform (Britain) 154, 284
Titmuss, Richard 290 and anxiety 285–8, 289, 295
Torres Straits Expedition (Cambridge welfare state (Britain) 2, 143, 154–5,
University, 1898) 72, 92, 94, 97 166–7, 293–4, 295
Townshend, Charles 328 Whitehead, Alfred North 285
trauma/traumatic events 143, 213, Whole Duty of Man, The 250
214, 215 Whythorne, Thomas 245
mother-son separation 54–5, 56 Wilson, Elizabeth 154
related to war 1–2, 91, 130, 133–5, Wilson, Kinnier 288–9
142, 328 Winckelmann, Johann 33
Trevi, Mario 312, 313–14 Winnicott, Donald Woods 2, 149, 151,
Trotter, Wilfred 105, 294 152, 154–7, 159–62, 163, 328
Turner, Julia 107 and child psychoanalysis 162–6
clinic (Paddington Green Children’s
unconscious, the Hospital) 162–3, 164, 165–6,
Freud’s work on 7, 16, 22, 35, 42, 73, 168n13
74, 75, 90, 309 and Freud 151, 152, 153, 154, 157–8,
and historical studies 149 170n60
informing artworks/painting 265–6, history-taking 152 , 163–4, 165, 211,
268–9, 271, 279 see also Abstract 212
Expressionism; drip paintings infant hallucination 150
and mother-child relationships 134, 141, “Manic Defence” 161
149, 151–2, 165, 166, 171n87, 204 and marriage 157, 158
see also collective unconscious publications: Clinical Notes on the Disorders
of Childhood 163–4; “Hate in the
Van den Berg, Jan Hendrick 326 Counter Transference” 162; Human
Verdiglione, Armando 320n16 Nature 150; Playing and Reality 151
Index 347
relationships: with parents 155–7, 162; Wootton, Barbara 292

with Joan Riviere 159, 161, 162, worker compensation schemes 2, 5, 286,
170n75; with James Strachey 157–8, 287–8, 290, 292, 298n20
170n64 workforces see welfare reform (Britain);
and religion 155, 157 worker compensation schemes
studies of mother-child Workmen’s Compensation Acts (1897,
relationships 149–51, 154, 158, 1906, 1923) 286, 287, 292
162–3, 164–6, 172n120, 204 World War I 6, 106, 123, 143, 289, 314
undergoing analysis 157, 159, 161–2, see also war neuroses
168n18 World War II 123, 132, 221, 293, 329–30
witchcraft, history of 8n13, 232, 261n16 see also war neuroses
Wolff, Charlotte 116
Women’s suffrage 152 Zutphen, Henry van 233

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor

Part I Freud, Freudianism, and History

Part II Psychoanalytic Pasts

Part III Psychoanalysis and Historical Subjectivities

Notes on Contributors 333

suffering, which, as Rhodri Hayward and Sally Alexander differently demon-

staunchly psychoanalytic scholars as Peter Gay condemning psychohistory

identities (women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities) brought fresh voices into

eminence ensured it a respectful reception, yet the challenges it posed to

as long as human history is being written, present-day minds will strive to

Probably it will always be a kind of corner, psychoanalysis and history.

A central theme of our dialogue was the importance of Enlightenment to

Enlightenment, showing how the rational, anticlerical position of the “party

intense pleasures. Freud’s Enlightenment, in other words, was not a dream of

mastery through assimilation. As Robert Dieter and Mark Micale comment

For me, however, mastery through assimilation is also a description of coop-

Although I have a strong intellectual debt to psychoanalysis, I have not myself

extended these enlightened-Stoic traditions. As Amelie Rorty has noted, “The

Recent decades have seen extensive work on the history of psychoanalysis

the dominant culture; or to remain observant Jews, a marginalized minor-

anti-Semitism in his professional life, at the hands of members of the liberal

At first, Charcot’s recognition of male hysteria, and insistence on its uni-

“liberal pessimistic” conclusion that Freud’s work should be read as offering

The subject is here presented as always already capable of taking responsibil-

masculinity of the Christian west.63 The pressure of the new anti-Semitic

to anti-Semitism, one of “combative defiance,” becomes a persona that “Freud

relationship to his Jewish identity, circumcision: that which inscribes on the

works, as he sought to apply his theoretical and clinical discoveries to the

2. Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American

74. Ibid., 206, 210.

99. Sprengnether, “Reading Freud’s Life,” 27–46; Eastman, “Freud,” 339–344.

homosexuality is only at its most superficial found in representations of the

Constant “gnawing at Leonardo” yielded “not a line.”15 A week later, it was

What little was known to Freud of Leonardo’s childhood may be briefly

psychoanalysis and homosexuality has, until quite recently, been charac-

he highlighted the boy’s suppression of mother-love but didn’t mention the

advantages in homosexuality, suited as it was to “large agglomerations of

In the “General Preface” to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

on his return, he was also invited in 1893 to teach experimental psychol-

Freud’s theory of the unconscious is of far wider application than the

association, analysis of resistances, and dream analysis. Among these doctors,

Rivers the Dreamer

Following the armistice in November 1918, the academic year in Cambridge

One who wishes to satisfy himself whether or no unconscious experience

The curious example he gives, which he himself finds so convincing of the

in my mind in connection with that upper storey”20 of the house in which

In October 1916 I was transferred to a hospital for officers, where I soon

elements that appeared in the dream, in particular the recent occasions on

I am reading Freud on dreams, most exciting—I see in my mind’s eye a

Russell would express this appeal of Freudianism in his authoritative style in

In the history of my attitude towards Freud’s theory of the dream . . . a scep-

Rivers then recapitulated the development of his views beyond those of

One of the greatest hindrances to the psychological study of dreams, or

powers and, in particular, printed Romain Rolland’s later famous denuncia-

So Rivers now revised his interpretation: instead of it being a continuation

edited and published in Austria in French, Italian, English, as well as German,

Three evenings a week I went along to Rivers’ room to give my anti-war

Sassoon’s recollection of the “weekly periodical which contained trans-

showed it to be a representation of a conflict (recently aroused by his con-

“I propose,” [Rivers] says, “to regard Freud’s formula [of wish-fulfilment] as

[Rivers] has been able to confirm Freud’s theory up to a certain point,

These two well-informed reviewers agreed: Rivers’s criticisms of Freud were