In Tribute to John Forrester (1949–2015)

In this issue we remember John Forrester. An active, inspiring presence in the world of psychoanalysis across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, he opened new paths in psychoanalytic theory, the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic history. He did so in the first place as a historian of science and culture, in works such as Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions, and, with Lisa Appignanesi, in Freud’s Women: Family, Patients, Followers. He did so also as the innovative, tireless editor of Psychoanalysis and History, as a colleague and mentor, and as a teacher. American Imago was privileged to have John serve on its editorial advisory board for more than a decade, and we are honored to publish here the tributes to him that Maud Ellmann, Sherry Turkle, and Daniel Pick presented at the service dedicated to him at King’s College, Cambridge, in May of this year. –The Editor

Maud Ellmann

I first met John Forrester way back in the 1970s, when he was a Junior Research Fellow at King’s, and renowned for his prodigious knowledge of Freud. I was an undergraduate in English at the time, and I was taking a Tripos paper that is still quaintly known as “the English Moralists,” which covers such honorary Englishmen as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. My supervisor for this paper was Colin McCabe, fresh from Paris and bursting with exciting new ideas, which were regarded with intense suspicion in stick-in-the-mud Cambridge. Anyway it was Colin’s brainwave, for which I am eternally grateful, that I should get in touch with John Forrester to benefit from his expertise in psychoanalysis. So I did, and we spent an unforgettable hour talking about Freud and Lacan.

As a teacher John conveyed a great sense of authority, but not by flaunting his learning or brilliance; he held those in reserve. Like a good analyst, John was a disconcertingly attentive listener, who seemed to find everything I said much more intriguing than it really was (and no doubt much more symptomatic than I realized). Needless to say, he was extremely helpful; the first of his many books on Freud had just come out, and he was now embarking on his long critical engagement with Lacan. But what I remember most about our hour together was John’s curiosity—about Freud, about me, about our mutual friends. John was a wonderful gossip, and he also understood the key role of gossip in creating and sustaining institutions, including psychoanalysis itself.

In fact there is not that much difference between psychoanalysis and gossip; what we say when we are “lying on the couch”—John’s pun—is much the same as what we whisper to our friends about third parties. As John puts it, gossip and psychoanalysis “are both conversations taking place in the absence of the real” and specifically in the absence of the parties being talked about. “When we gossip,” the poet Auden says, “we do for nothing in the street or the parlor what we should have to pay two guineas an hour for doing in the consulting room.” And Auden goes on to insist: “all art is based on gossip, that is to say, on observing and telling.” The same goes for psychoanalysis.

Well, it is the fate of psychoanalysis, like gossip, to be vilified; both are constantly accused of exaggeration and embroidery, but also of reducing everything to sex. As John shows in my favorite of his many books, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, psychoanalysis has always been disreputable, not just because it deflates the much-vaunted human spirit but because it flouts the protocols of positivism. Like gossip, psychoanalysis remains an unofficial form of knowledge, even though it apes official forms by producing the whole panoply of rituals and institutions associated with professional legitimacy.

It was because of John’s interest in disreputable knowledge that Peter de Bolla invited him to join the discussion-group he launched many years ago in King’s with Simon Goldhill, Jonathan Burt, and myself, which was called Unofficial Knowledge. Paradoxically this group...