Cold War Freud
Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes

This book provides a panoramic history of psychoanalysis at its zenith, as human nature was rethought in the wake of war and the global transformations that followed.

Dagmar Herzog (Author)

9781107072398, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2016

320 pages, 20 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.64 kg

'Herzog shows convincingly that without the pressures exerted by the world beyond the consulting room, psychoanalysis would have withered away in irrelevance. No one has shown more forcefully than Herzog that the recurrently staged 'mutual rescue operation[s] of psychoanalysis and politics' secured the discipline's future.' Elizabeth Lunbeck, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches.

Introduction
Part I. Leaving the World Outside: 1. The libido wars
2. Homophobia's durability and the reinvention of psychoanalysis
Part II. Nazism's Legacies: 3. Post-Holocaust antisemitism and the ascent of PTSD
4. The struggle between Eros and death
Part III. Radical Freud: 5. Exploding Oedipus
6. Ethnopsychoanalysis in the era of decolonization
Afterword
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Psychoanalytical theory [Freudian psychology JMAF], The Cold War [HBTW], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3]