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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 402-403



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Book Review

Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge


Sarah Winter. Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. xvi + 385 pp. $55.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paperbound).

Why did Freudian psychology become a dominant intellectual force in the twentieth century? Although it failed to take root as an academic discipline, psychoanalysis became an important interdisciplinary phenomenon as well as a popular mode of thinking. Sarah Winter, whose primary domain is English, has a wide field of vision, including classical philology, philosophy, and the history of the humanities and social sciences. She examines how a style of thinking emerges at a particular time and place and how it both serves and affects individuals and society. Her task (well done!) is to study how we explain ourselves—specifically, the causes and consequences of Freud's way.

Unlike some writers who clot their work with needless complexity, Winter gives clarity its due, integrating her materials and arguments carefully, crossing disciplinary lines adroitly, and helping the reader with summaries pro re nata. Her goal is to help find "the forms and methods of generalization that most accurately account for the ways people live and think, and have lived and thought in the past, and that can most effectively guarantee social justice" (p. 286).

Sigmund Freud used the classical story of Oedipus as template for all human development, individual and social, setting out to validate scientifically his interpretation of cultural myths and his psychological reading of clients' narratives. He touched a nerve, as it were, in many academics and ordinary folk, creating a therapeutic ethos in which inner feelings gained status as cause and effect of almost everything human. He made psychoanalysis a powerful tool of individual and cultural understanding whereby, Winter writes, "the primacy of unconscious desire within human agency seems both individually and culturally inescapable. . ." (p. 118). A warning metaphor comes to mind: if the only tool we have is a hammer, then everything gets treated like a nail.

In a chapter on "schoolboy psychology," Winter addresses Freud's classical education and his later use of Oedipus, invoking cultural authority to trumpet a "scientific" advance. A second theme is tragedy, seen by Freud as the essence of the psyche and of civilization, elaborated by Jacques Lacan in furthering Freud's strategy for institutionalizing psychoanalysis. [End Page 402]

Beginning with an impressive review of literary and psychological readings of classical myth, coupled with a good look at Viennese academia and culture in Freud's time, Winter goes on to the question of professionalization and the maintenance of scholarly disciplines. Freud had to differentiate his new field from psychiatry and neurology in order to free himself from their established procedures and requirements for certification. He wanted to establish a discipline that could compete with and/or influence sociology and anthropology, based on the idea that "all cultural or social phenomena are in some sense ramifications of individual psychology," and that his discoveries could "explain virtually everything human" (p. 198):

Disciplines are "myths," because they are open-ended research projects, but also because they do cultural work—they have social and ideological effects and are produced in contention with other forms of knowledge. These contests are not merely rhetorical but are also struggles for resources, for epistemological jurisdictions, and for scientific and public recognition. (p. 272)

This book is a fine example of interdisciplinary scholarship (the reference matter, a wonderful resource, takes up one hundred pages). Readers will have their own examples of struggles for domains, as "thought style" and as formal discipline. In mental health, family therapy and hypnotherapy are examples of important modalities trying to establish themselves at a time when biological and pharmacological approaches are dominant. Sarah Winter's work gives us tools to understand these trends and tensions, probably including those surrounding the discipline of history of medicine.

 



E. James Lieberman
George Washington University School of Medicine

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