New books on the early history of British psychoanalysis: An essay review

Reviews the books, Freud in Cambridge by John Forrester and Laura Cameron and Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography by Philip Kuhn. Sigmund Freud and his invention of the discipline of psychoanalysis had an immense intellectual impact on 20th-century culture. Yet, although his writings were received with great enthusiasm-as well as with hostility-we are still lacking full accounts of all the various sites where Freud and his ideas were widely discussed and which rapidly paired his name (as early as the 1920s) with those of eminent intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. Forrester and Cameron's Freud in Cambridge is a good book to read alongside Phillip Kuhn's Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography, published in 2017 (for my full review, see Michal, 2019). Here, I include only what is relevant to a comparison of the two books. Freud in Cambridge opposes writing the history of psychoanalysis modeled on the "Great Man" and focusing on Sigmund Freud the individual and his decisive influence, as it rejects a historical model centered around the bureaucracy of institutions such as the International Psycho-Analytic Association. Concentrating on the British case, the book chooses instead to look beyond Ernest Jones' efforts to spread Freud's ideas, and beyond the workings of the British Psycho-Analytical Society (BPAS) that Jones created in 1919. Kuhn's periodization is earlier than that of Forrester and Cameron, as he provides a meticulous examination and close textual reading of contemporary sources to look at the last years of the 19th century and the era before the outbreak of the Great War. Similarly, Kuhn's book is a closely researched study of the early days of psychoanalysis in Britain within broad medical and social contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).