Dagmar Herzog. Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes.

Abstract

Books about Freud are often overwhelmed by the majesty of the man, and certainly of his orthodoxy. Books about the Cold War are often similarly overwhelmed by its all-pervasive repressiveness (or at least its repressive tolerance). Dagmar Herzog’s Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes miraculously avoids both traps. Its thesis, loosely presented in six discursive episodes, is that the “Cold War,” broadly construed, witnessed the rise and fall of a dizzying variety of Freudianisms, including one powerful version dominant in the 1950s and the 1960s—American, desexualized, desocialized—but also a wider array, especially in the 1970s, connected to feminism, gay liberation, decolonization, and, most interestingly, attempts to grapple with the Holocaust. This is not a highly controversial thesis, aligned as it is with much history of psychoanalysis of the last generation, which regrets the betrayal of Freud’s radicalism by the postwar American medical establishment and celebrates the hundred flowers blooming in the wake of 1968. But Herzog’s touch is lighter, her cast of characters more diverse, her catchment area wider—Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland figure prominently, Latin America has walk-on roles—and her parti pris less disabling. She wants, as she says in her conclusion, to write the history of psychoanalysis more like “one would any other kind of intellectual or cultural history” (217). At last!