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History Workshop Journal 61 (2006) 276-281



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Psyche and Clio

Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, Knopf, New York, 2004; 430 pp., $30; ISBN 0-679-44654-0.

In 1933, Freud inscribed a copy of his correspondence with Albert Einstein, Why War?, for Benito Mussolini. His dedication hailed Mussolini as a 'champion of culture', a distinction Freud felt he had earned by his support for excavation of Italian archaeological sites. Five years later, Freud, his family, and thirty-eight other psychoanalysts fled to London to escape a fascist regime with which Freud's 'champion of culture' was closely allied. This ironic turn of events was, according to Eli Zaretsky in Secrets of the Soul, typical of the history of psychoanalysis during what he identifies as its eighty-six year ascendancy in the West, from 1890 to 1976. In his account psychoanalysis seems capable of virtually infinite transformation. In Central Europe, for example, it was a force for emancipation; in the more conservative democracies of the US and Britain, however, it served the purpose of social control.

Secrets of the Soul is the first book to attempt a historical assessment of the global significance of psychoanalysis, and as such it is extraordinarily valuable. It traces the history of psychoanalysis through the biographies of those who were involved in it, the political and social histories of the places and the societies in which they worked, and the shifting fortunes of the concepts they created, developed, and left behind. Zaretsky places psychoanalysis at the centre of the most profound transformations of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It was at its strongest and most influential, he argues, during the second industrial revolution of the 1890s and the protest movements of the 1960s. After that, in Zaretsky's view, analytic treatment and thought was increasingly sanitized, as the growth of the welfare state, managed care, shifting fashions in child-rearing and changing attitudes towards death cast increased suspicion on the idea that anything good could come out of the stimulation of aggression and despair. There was no longer any place for a treatment that was not afraid of fury. Psychoanalysis was inefficient and it encouraged a kind of temporary craziness. The embrace of human perversity no longer made sense.

That psychoanalysis was a theory and a practice on which the West depended for most of the twentieth century is the message of this book. And equally, its message is that that dependency is finally over. Zaretsky argues that Secrets of the Soul is the first book to attempt such a wide-ranging assessment because the necessary distance between psychoanalysis and ourselves, 'with the waning of the medical fortunes of psychoanalysis' (p. 4), is only now beginning to appear. Previous historical accounts of psychoanalysis have focused on particular figures, the history of psychoanalytic thought, the story of psychoanalysis in particular countries, or specific case histories. Zaretsky's much more ambitious book is both a celebration of psychoanalysis and its elegy, even though, as Zaretsky acknowledges at the end, 'a psychoanalytic [End Page 276] profession has survived both the psychopharmacological assault and the cultural turn' (p. 342). But in his view the political, medical and social capital of psychoanalysis has dwindled almost to nothing.

One of the difficult undertakings of a book like this is to define its subject in the first place, and Zaretsky is scrupulous in distinguishing psychoanalysis from a whole range of related disciplines and practices (mind-cure, psychotherapy, counselling), many of which were formed or reshaped under its influence. He identifies one central idea that is unique to psychoanalytic practice and thought: analysis of the patient's resistance (the negative transference). Belief in the existence of such resistance implied a new model for the understanding of human psychology, one that saw the psyche as perverse, recalcitrant, and bent on undermining its own interests. In this version of things, the analyst shifted, as Zaretsky points out, from being 'a "helper" into someone who, in his or her daily work, served as the target of the deepest paranoia, defensiveness and rage...

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