Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes

by Dagmar Herzog

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.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, History, Psychology, Nonfiction, Social, Politics

318 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 2017

About the author

Dagmar Herzog (born 1961) is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis, theology and religion, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory, and she has edited anthologies on sexuality in the Third Reich, sexuality in twentieth-century Austria, and the Holocaust.

Reviews

[Nize · Rating 5 out of 5]

eine absolute Leseempfehlung, wenn man die Entwicklung der Psychoanalyse nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg verstehen will. Man bekommt Einblicke in die wichtigsten theoretischen Entwicklungen und Revisionen, die politischen Kontexte, die diese bedingten und die in diesem Zusammenhang wichtigsten Theoretiker_innen. Sehr differenziert und klug von Dagmar Herzog zusammengefasst.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Lots to learn here.

[Cyprien Saito · Rating 4 out of 5]

This must be a German non-freudien interpretation of the psychoanalitical era after Anna Freud. That is, it cannot be other than the Post-68erd interpretation.