Cold War Freud : psychoanalysis in an age of catastrophes

Author / Creator

Herzog, Dagmar, 1961- author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

No one has been able to explain why psychoanalysis was such a powerful emotional and intellectual framework in the Cold War decades - or how it could serve both conservative and subversive ends. In...

No one has been able to explain why psychoanalysis was such a powerful emotional and intellectual framework in the Cold War decades - or how it could serve both conservative and subversive ends. In part, the reasons lie in radical revisions to understandings of human nature in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust. Yet the ascendance of psychoanalysis also involved the new challenges brought by the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the new Latin American dictatorships and the emergence of postcolonial cultures. In 'Cold War Freud', Dagmar Herzog sheds new light on the impact of these epochal transformations on theories of aggression, desire and trauma, and on the tensions between psychoanalysis' possibilities as a theory of human nature and as a toolbox for cultural criticism. She recovers psychoanalysis at its historic zenith and restores it to its place as an essential part of twentieth-century social and intellectual history.

"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." -- Publisher's description

Show More