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

Psychoanalysis has been contested since its founding in the late nineteenth century, charged variously with being unscientific, obsessed with sex, preposterous, and, most pointedly, irrelevant. At the same time, however, it has proven remarkably influential and durable as both a body of theory and a set of practices. Sigmund Freud may be dead, but Freudianism lives on, its presence evident in a broad swath of twenty-first century cultural and intellectual life—from the professional social sciences to popular culture and from established therapeutic practices to the realm of self-help and spiritual quests.

The inheritance of Freud has been mixed. Through its century-long existence, psychoanalysis has served as an arbiter of the normal and as a resource for radical possibilities both cultural and political. It has been decried as hopelessly limited by its roots in its founder's bourgeois, early-twentieth-century Vienna and, at the same time, deployed as a toolkit for understanding the inner worlds and inner conflicts of peoples living far beyond the metropole. Feminists have castigated it for its sexist prescriptions while also mining its precepts to challenge sex and gender heteronormativity. The list could go on.

Herzog perceptively argues in her illuminating Cold War Freud that politics internal to psychoanalysis (drive theorists, for example, tend to cluster at the more conservative end of the analytic conceptual spectrum) are only loosely linked to—or determinative of—politics in the world beyond (in which the drive, or innate human aggressiveness, can be mobilized for radical critique). Psychoanalytic theory has proven remarkably supple, despite the persistent attempts by Freud and his followers to establish and enforce the boundaries of orthodoxy. Many psychoanalysts have long defended such policing on the grounds that the alternative, theoretical pluralism, was "theoretical fragmentation" threatening the very survival of the discipline (213).

Herzog shows, however, that precisely the opposite was true; psychoanalysis was not weakened but periodically strengthened and revivified by the efforts of both insiders and outsiders who would not toe the party line. The warnings of such elders as Jones, Freud's biographer and allround bulldog, against deviating from a strict focus on the psychic interior went unheeded.¹ Herzog demonstrates—in a series of case studies, spanning the 1940s through the 1980s—that pluralism, pressure from once-marginalized voices, and engagement with pressing social and political issues ensured the discipline's flourishing. In historical retrospect, by the 1970s, a second psychoanalytic "golden age" had clearly been entered, notwithstanding the alarmist entreaties and dire predictions of Jones and others.

In the United States, much of the postwar psychoanalytic action that was visible to a larger public centered on sex and sexual orientation. Less apparent were the exciting and productive intraprofessional battles of the 1960s and 1970s about whether narcissism was a pathology or a normal developmental stage. Those debates revived the discipline from the inside and, once mobilized for cultural critique by Lasch and others, enhanced the public fortunes of psychoanalysis.² In a chapter chronicling American psychoanalysts' homophobia in the postwar period, Herzog shows that activist clinicians were not the only ones responsible for the profession's eventual about-face on the question of homosexuality as perversion. Interestingly, sexologists—foremost among them Alfred Kinsey in his blockbuster, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948)—also helped to prompt a reassessment. Kinsey was famously indifferent to the sources of sexual pleasure; a counter of orgasms, he was interested only in the evidence. Sexologists' empiricism—their focus on physiology rather than psychology—contributed to their popularity, threatening psychoanalysts' monopoly on talk about sex while destigmatizing it. Psychoanalysts disdained Kinsey, but he and his fellow sexologists did the profession a favor in laying the groundwork for their eventual disentangling of sexual orientation, sex, and love.

In postwar Western and Central Europe, the psychoanalytic focus was on trauma and aggression. In two fascinating chapters, Herzog traces the discipline's confrontation with post-Holocaust history, the so-called "external reality" that orthodox...