The Freud Files
An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

This book shows how psychoanalysis attained its prominent cultural position, not through surmounting its rivals, but through rescripting history.

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Author), Sonu Shamdasani (Author)

9780521509909, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2011

414 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.9 cm, 0.78 kg

'Attempts to debunk the legend in the 1970s and 80s failed. But a current assault, helped by a wealth of 'declassified' material, correspondence and critical studies, looks more likely to dismantle the monomyth … the legend is 'fraying from all sides'.' New Scientist

How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves and how these became solidified into indisputable 'facts'.

Introduction: the past of an illusion
1. Privatising science
2. The interprefaction of dreams
3. Case histories
4. Policing the past
Coda: what was psychoanalysis?

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Clinical psychology [MMJ], Psychoanalytical theory [Freudian psychology JMAF], History of ideas [JFCX]