An English Freud?

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper considers the cultural and academic climate in latenineteenth-century Victorian culture and compares it with that of Austria and the rest of Europe. In many ways London was more isolated, more peripheral than Vienna. There were foreign influences, certainly, but they were not strong enough at first to shift the materialist concepts of the mind which were so prominent at that time. It was the great neurologists such as Hughlings Jackson who dominated the scene, and in this they were influential on Freud himself, but the climate was essentially opposed to the thinking that allowed psychoanalysis to flourish in Europe. However, despite this, the great pioneers of psychoanalysis, especially Ernest Jones, as well as the psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in applying psychoanalytic principles more widely, did gradually turn the tide of opinion. Not an English Freud, but many institutions and individuals that we can be quite proud of.