John Forrester

Freud in Cambridge

The lecture sketches a previously unacknowledged source of intense interest in psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the 1920s, amongst non-medical scientists, some but not all of whom were loosely associated with Bloomsbury. Amongst them were Lionel Penrose (later founder of human genetics) and Frank Ramsey (mathematician and philosopher), whose pilgrimages to Vienna are followed. The lecture reflects on the implications of this episode for the place of psychoanalysis in the university, both then and now.

On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

782 A preliminary draft of this paper was prepared for a colloquium at Princeton University entitled ‘Model Systems, Cases, and Exemplary Narratives’, 11 December 1999. I would like to thank Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise for the invitation to contribute and for the reflections of my commentator, Carl Schorske, as well as incisive comments by Anthony Grafton and the late Gerry Geison. Since then, it has benefited from the responses of Lauren Berlant, Martin Kusch, and John Burnham, to whom I’m very grateful. I learned much from a recent conference at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, entitled ‘Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, March 2006, organized by Ipek Demir and Kusch, in particular the contributions of Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Kusch, and Simon Schaffer. In the final stages of preparation I received very useful advice from Berlant and the coeditors of Critical Inquiry and an extensive detailed commentary from and email exchange with Kuhn’s son Nathaniel Kuhn (who also shared with me his mother’s, Kay Kuhn’s, memories), for which I’m extremely grateful; late and crucial clarifications I owe to Adam Phillips. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Kassler (1951–2002), with whom I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

1919: PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, CAMBRIDGE AND LONDON — MYERS, JONES AND MACCURDY

Viewing the reception of psychoanalysis in Britain from Cambridge, the paper examines the intertwining histories of the post-War British Psychological Society and the founding of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, following the initiatives of the two principal psychological entrepreneurs of the era, Charles Myers and Ernest Jones, Reforms in Cambridge in which psychoanalysis played a significant part are analysed, including the foundation of a Clinic for Nervous Diseases and the establishment of a separate Department of Experimental Psychology. The career of J. T. MacCurdy, Joness student and Lecturer in Psychopathology at Cambridge, is discussed.

Malpighi's De polypo cordis: An annotated translation

Malpighis De polypo cordis (1666) represents a significant contribution to the understanding of blood, its composition and its clotting. In this work, written during his occupation of the primary Chair of Medicine at Messina (1662-66),l he recognized, albeit dimly, fibrinogen as a regular component of blood, and began to investigate the conditions which provoke or prevent clotting, either intravascularly or in shed blood. His microscopes had enabled him to discover the pulmonary capillaries five years earlier. Now he provided the first precise description, aided by microscopy, of the laminar structure of a clot and the sequence of its formation. He specified how the appearance of post-mortem clot in the left and right sides of the heart differed. Here too it can be claimed that the first sighting of red blood cells is recorded, although Malpighi was at the time far from appreciating their significance.

The English Freud: W. H. R. Rivers, Dreaming, and the Making of the Early Twentieth-Century Human Sciences

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 science 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 question: 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.

AFTERWORD: PSYCHOANALYSIS, FASCISM, FUNDAMENTALISM AND ATHEISM

The conference on ‘Psychoanalysis, Fascism and Fundamentalism’ which produced the papers which this Journal is pleased to publish was an intense, stimulating and memorable event. As one hopes of such a conference, it produced as many questions as it answered. Yet none of the speakers picked out one odd feature of linking the three nouns together to make a title and a theme. Psychoanalysis is a science and a therapeutic practice, Fascism is a political ideology and a political practice and fundamentalism is, following the OED, a movement advocating strict adherence to certain tenets held to be fundamental (i.e. non-negotiable or not open to question) to a religious faith. So three movements: one quasi-scientific, one political, one religious. Why bring these three different worlds together? Finding an answer to this question may be helped by noting a further oddity – a coincidence that may be more than that. Fascism was born in Italy in the wake of the First World War; although psychoanalysis was formed as a theory and a programme in the first two decades of the 20th century, it only became a movement with a major cultural resonance, whose ripples from a certain moment onwards extended very widely and with no coordinated control through the arts and sciences, in the same historical moment – in the wake of the First World War. Strikingly, fundamentalism as a term and a movement also dates from the same moment; the OED gives a first usage in English-American in 1923 (Daily Mail, 24 May 1923, p. 8: ‘Mr. William Jennings Bryan has been exerting the full force of his great eloquence in a campaign on behalf of what is termed “Fundamentalism” ’), with a usefully indicative usage in 1925 from the journal Relig. Yesterday & To-morrow: ‘There has been in America some surprise at the sudden rise of Fundamentalism in the last five years.’ The third OED reference, from The Observer in 1927, even points – inadvertently? is this another coincidence? – to a link between fundamentalism and Fascism: ‘Fundamentalism and the

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY

For this journal, the question of the relation of psychoanalysis as a theory and practice to any theory and practice of history is of obvious interest. Is psychoanalysis a part of history, broadly construed? After all, Freud declared in 1901 that a goal of treatment, and also an index of its success, is the production of ‘an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history’. Can psychoanalysis ever be separated off from the requirements every historical enquiry must recognize and obey? In the first article in this issue, ‘Freud and history before 1905: from defending to questioning the theory of a glorious past’, Patricia Cotti undertakes a delicate and careful enquiry into the unintentionally concealed theme of Geschichte in Freuds early work. She allows the terms ‘story’, ‘history’, ‘case history’ and their relatives to become animated and destabilized in Freuds enquiry; she situates his historical project in the context of two different models of history influencing him: that of Schliemann and his...

Essay Review : Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. Freud on Women. A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl. London: The Hogarth Press, 1990. Pp xii + 399 (bibliography & index). Hardcover, £20.00 ISBN 0-7012-0902-X

texts on that topic, together with texts on sexuality, bisexuality and masochism. As the useful though unduly restricted bibliography to this anthology of Freud’s writings on women indicates, there is no shortage of books which review and debate this area. In reviewing an anthology of this sort, on a topic which has elicited such passionate and intelligent writings, a further necessarily brief addition to this enormous literature is not called for; rather, an indication of the way in which this anthology has been constructed and how its construction is intended to guide the debate is more in order. Freud’s controversial theory of femininity presents us with a paradox and poses the anthologist a procedural and conceptual problem: of the approximately 8,000 pages in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE), only some 65 are devoted solely and explicitly to the theory of femininity. In an anthology on this topic, these 65 pages choose themselves, and they are duly present here: the papers that Freud wrote from 1924 on, explicitly addressed to questions of femininity. The fact, however, that only these 65 pages choose themselves should have given the anthologist pause for thought: why do Freud’s writings on the theory of femininity occupy less than 1 % of his total writings? What other principles, following from an answer to this larger question, should be used in completing the selection of texts? Young-Bruehl fails to address the first of these questions, and substitutes two intentions of her own for the second. She wishes firstly to ’discourage the circulation of simplistic versions of what Freud supposedly said about women’, and secondly to highlight the centrality of the concept of bisexuality in the development of Freud’s views of female sexuality (and sexuality in general). Her