John Forrester Libri

Reflection on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines.

In this book, Forrester explores the use of case histories to analyze social, psychological, and historical processes. He examines the psychoanalytic case as a unique form of writing and connects it to law, medicine, philosophy, and science. His insights will engage scholars and professionals across various disciplines.

"Freud's Women examines biography, case history, dreams, correspondence, journals, and theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many stories of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salome; Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysis--all these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy." -- Publisher

In a challenging collection of essays, noted historian and philosopher of science John Forrester delves into the disputes over Freud's dead body. With wit and erudition, Forrester gives us a sense of the ethical surprises and epistemological riddles that a century of tumultuous psychoanalytical debate has often obscured. In these pages we explore dreams, history, ethics, political theory, and the motor of psychoanalysis as a scientific movement.

The authors explore the influence of Freud's thinking on twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life within Cambridge and beyond.

John Forrester's passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud's thinking and the nature of Freud's discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian's eye for context, Forrester explores Freud's biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself - sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language - as well as Freud's development of a new clinical practice. Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking - not only Freud's, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished. Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch to the campus to film and literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century and our own.