Daniel Pick

Pro Patria: Blocking the Tunnel

his essay offers an account of the literature of invasion, and specifically of the Tinvasion of Britain through the Channel Tunnel in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. It is a contribution to our understanding of the cultural anxieties of that specific age which also bears upon wider questions about the imagination of national space and the terms of collective identification and belonging.’ 1 Max Pemberton’s novel, Pro patria ( 1901 ) , with its tale of secret trespass beneath the sea and its exemplary conflation of racial, sexual, cultural and military dangers, provides my central point of focus. This work is situated, however, alongside a range of other contemporary texts articulating defence fears. I shall be less concerned here with biographical questions about the authorship of the novels and pamphlets cited or with any detailed consideration of the institutional provenance of the protests (whether in Parliament or in periodicals such as The Nineteenth Century and Blackzuood’s Magazine);2 rather my focus is on the constitution of the ’community’ and the ’other’ in and between these texts themselves. I am primarily arguing that this network of writing on and protests against the Tunnel must be read in relation to other social and cultural concerns at the time rather than as the mere reiteration of some ancient British dread

Lectures Part One: Introduction to Quentin Skinner: Interpretation in psychoanalysis and history

The article on interpretation by the historian, Quentin Skinner, published in the present issue of the IJP, is concerned with textual analysis rather than psychoanalysis, yet the debate in which it engages has considerable relevance to the work that analysts do. In this brief introduction to his paper, we will indicate the significance of Skinner’s contribution to historiography in the context of some recent developments in the human sciences and suggest various implications of his argument for psychoanalytic thought. Quentin Skinner’s work since the 1960s has brought together historical and philosophical thinking in important new ways. His primary field of research has been in Renaissance and early modern political thought, but his writing and teaching have also made a considerable impact on the way intellectual and cultural historians at large approach ideas and systems of belief. Skinner has sought systematically to address the historicity of thought, unlike, say, traditional political and moral philosophers who have tended to approach ideas in terms of their enduring value, as understood from their own point of view. Such philosophers typically construct canons of exemplary philosophical texts, about which they ask analytic and evaluative rather than historical and descriptive questions. It is the logical structure and enduring moral implications of the views of, for example, Machiavelli or Hobbes that have occupied them. The historical situation of and specific discursive purposes behind texts such as The Prince or Leviathan were less likely to be examined. Ideas that were once influential but later came to be eclipsed, or even to seem absurd, were rarely seriously explored by such commentators, still less placed in context, since the concern in this tradition was precisely with the ideas deemed to have lasting value for us. Much of the thought and belief of the past was thus ignored. Perhaps more surprisingly, at the outset of Quentin Skinner’s career, many historians, at least in Britain, also took a rather unhistorical view of ideas and, at worst, this led to the assumption that a continuous conversation has proceeded unabated across the ages, with a basically unchanging set of concepts and preoccupations. Moreover, it was quite commonplace for historians to treat beliefs and ideas as relatively unimportant in themselves. In the final instance, it seemed, something else – be

Thinking About Denial

Abstract This essay considers the frequent and varied uses of ‘denial’ in modern political discourse, suggests the specific psychoanalytic meanings the term has acquired and asks how useful this Freudian concept may be for historians. It notes the debates among historians over the uses of psychoanalysis, but argues that concepts such as ‘denial’, ‘disavowal’, ‘splitting’ and ‘negation’ can help us to understand both individual and group behaviour. The authors dwell, especially, on ‘disavowal’ and argue it can provide a particularly useful basis for exploring how and why states of knowing and not knowing co-exist. Historical examples are utilized to explore these states of mind: most briefly, a fragment from a report about the war criminals, produced by an American psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trial; at greater length, the political arguments and historical writings of an eighteenth-century slave-owner; and finally, a case in a borough of London in the late-twentieth-century, where the neglect, abuse and murder of a child was shockingly ‘missed’ by a succession of social agencies and individuals, who had evidence of the violence available to them.

Psychoanalysis, history and national culture

This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures – social, political and intellectual – of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Joness work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

Maladies of the will: freedom, fetters and the fear of Freud

The history of the self, Roy Porter observes in his poignant, posthumously published book Flesh in the Age of Reason, is commonly told as the tale of growing individualism and personal autonomy, a saga of ‘the maturing self-consciousness of the self-determining individual’. Porter allocates Freud a couple of cameo roles and describes psychoanalysis as the culmination of a romantic impetus to know and tell all about the self. Freud ‘opened up new horizons of selfhood, or rather plumbed the psyche’s oceanic depths, exposing a hidden world of secret desires and treacherous drives’. Freud, Porter concludes, located the self in a ‘terrifying subterranean battleground of the id, ego and superego’.

Reviews : Ian Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness. Professionalisation and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France. Medicine and Society Series, vol. 4. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991.

’State-of-siege’, defensive strategies, ’a host of obstacles’, enduring ’friction’, pragmatic adaptation to the demands of a hostile wider community, ’vindication’. These are the phrases and ideas that punctuate Dowbiggin’s account of nineteenth-century French psychiatry. We are shown a profession constantly buffeted about, lacking sufficient credentials to achieve full acceptance, so often wrong-footed by the logic of critics, dazed by accusations of nefarious crimes, subversion, cruelty, charlatanism not least the wicked or at least drastically misconceived ’wrongful confinement’ of the sane. The medico-psychiatrists were peculiarly vulnerable to fluctuating fashions, their aspirations at the mercy of changing social events and the caprice of politics. As the editor of the Annales midico-psychologiques was to put it ruefully a century later, the alienists’ professional society had been a ’still-born victim’ of 1848. The beleaguered alienists