Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes by Dagmar Herzog (review)

At the heart of Dagmar Herzog’s new book is a question central to the history of sexuality as a scholarly field: What is the relationship between sexuality and other spheres of life such as politics and the economy? Cold War Freud traces how a wide range of those who have engaged with psychoanalytic ideas since 1945—as advocates or as critics—have thought about that question. The book consists essentially of six case studies (in rough chronological order but often overlapping in time), each of which places psychoanalytic thought in the broader context of the political and intellectual development of a particular place and time. Taken together, these chapters offer a coherent, gripping, and often surprising narrative of the development of psychoanalytic thinking across three continents and over sixty years.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine Freudian thinking in the Cold War period. Chapter 1 investigates the conflict between more traditional Freudians and the neo-Freudians who were more interested in social and cultural influences, as well as the conflicts of psychoanalysis as a whole with the views of religious leaders hostile to the sexually radical potentials of Freudianism. Chapter 2 discusses the conflicts between Freudianism and other strands of American sexual culture in the 1950s and 1960s: with Alfred Kinsey’s radically empiricist sexology (with its radical implications regarding the prevalence of sexual diversity); with behaviorist sex therapy (e.g., Masters and Johnson); with self-help and pop psychology; and with feminism and the homosexual rights movement. These conflicts, Herzog argues, led to the emergence of a conservative variant of Freudianism that focused on sexual dysfunctions as a consequence, not a cause, of neurosis and offered itself as a tool for the normalization of sexuality through the resolution of neuroses. It also invested heavily in the new “Love Doctrine” (65)—the idea that any sexual activity outside the context of a stable committed reproductive and familial relationship was dangerous, destructive, and unhealthy. A predominantly homophobic and sexually and socially prescriptive discipline suffered an “abrupt . . . decline in status” and “increasing marginalization . . . from the 1970s on” (70, 217).

In chapters 3 and 4 the focus widens to take in central Europe and Latin America. Chapter 3 examines the emergence of the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder in the course of psychoanalysts’ engagement with Jewish survivors’ claims for compensation for the psychological incapacitation resulting from wartime trauma, and then with the psychological problems facing Vietnam veterans and survivors of torture under various Latin American regimes. Ironically, Herzog asserts, the acceptance of the idea of PTSD “could be understood as a side-effect of . . . the Cold War and of struggles over decolonization” (121) because it shifted attention from the (political) causes of trauma to its treatment and blurred the line between perpetrators and victims. In chapter 4 the even more unsettling implications of debates regarding the status of aggression as a fundamental human drive are analyzed. The arguments of those, like Konrad Lorenz, who favored the proposition that aggression is a universal human trait were countered with arguments from the New Left that this belief tended toward the exculpation and trivialization of the crimes of the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, the New Left’s thesis that aggression was merely a product of repressed and frustrated sexual energies seemed to others grossly naive and dangerously utopian.

Chapter 5 turns to a happier topic: the theorists who sought to transcend this whole calculus of the drives and their repression or liberation and who by the 1980s had arrived at a radicalized variant of the neo-Freudian position examined in chapter 1. While psychoanalysis was “shedding whatever social subversive potential it once had” (157), New Left intellectual icons Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proposed a new “paradigm” of the “unremitting mutual imbrication of selves and society” (156, 158). They argued that capitalism, war, bureaucracy, fascism, the state, the economy, and everything else must be understood as the...