Freud in Cambridge

The authors explore the influence of Freud's thinking on twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life within Cambridge and beyond.

John Forrester (Author), Laura Cameron (Author)

9780521861908, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 March 2017

812 pages, 44 b/w illus. 1 map
23.5 x 16 x 3.7 cm, 1.27 kg

'Together, Forrester and Cameron produced a magnificent work of scholarship, nearly seven hundred pages in length, chronicling the development of Freudian thought in Cambridge. A tour de force of intellectual history and 'local history' … a fitting testament to John Forrester's many contributions to the development of psychoanalytical scholarship.' Brett Kahr, Confer (www.confer.uk.com)

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life.

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Tansley's dream
3. W. H. R. Rivers, the English Freud
4. Becoming Freudian in Cambridge - undergraduates and psychoanalysis
5. Discipline formation - psychology, English, philosophy
6. The 1925 group
7. The Malting House Garden School
8. A psychoanalytic debate in 1925
9. Bloomsbury analysts
10. Freud in Cambridge?
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Sexual behaviour [JMU], The self, ego, identity, personality [JMS], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Psychoanalytical theory [Freudian psychology JMAF], Psychology [JM], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], British & Irish history [HBJD1], History [HB], True stories: discovery / historical / scientific [BTH]