Cold War Freud - Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes

Hitzige Kämpfe tobten in der Folge des Zweiten Weltkrieges um das Erbe Sigmund Freuds. Die verspätete Aufarbeitung des Nationalsozialismus, die sexuelle Revolution und die Dekolonisation stießen fundamentale Transformationsprozesse in der psychoanalytischen Theorie an, die ihrerseits auf die Kultur zurückwirkten. Von den USA über Europa bis nach Lateinamerika schildert Dagmar Herzog die Deutungskämpfe einer Zunft, deren konkurrierende Theorien über Begehren, Angst, Aggression, Lust und Trauma mal konservativen, mal subversiven Zielen dienten - und hält damit ein innovatives Plädoyer für die Psychoanalyse als Erkenntnisinstrument im Dickicht der Verflechtung von Psyche und Gesellschaft.

Kurzbeschreibung:

This book provides a panoramic history of psychoanalysis at its zenith, as human nature was rethought in the wake of war and the global transformations that followed.

Klappentext:

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

Introduction; Part I. Leaving the World Outside: 1. The libido wars; 2. Homophobia's durability and the reinvention of psychoanalysis; Part II. Nazism's Legacies: 3. Post-Holocaust antisemitism and the ascent of PTSD; 4. The struggle between Eros and death; Part III. Radical Freud: 5. Exploding Oedipus; 6. Ethnopsychoanalysis in the era of decolonization; Afterword; Notes; Index.

Rezension:

'This is surely a history of the Cold War world as we did not know it, in which psychoanalytic conformists and rebels flex their way through the controversies of the era - Auschwitz, My Lai, student protests, postcolonial insurgencies, the culture of narcissism. Partly about the collapse of psychoanalysis in its bid to be the regulating body for Christian American normalcy, it is even more so the story of psychoanalysis resurgent and radical. Fiercely relevant.' Matt Ffytche, author of The Foundation of the Unconscious