In this article I map a set of points that could begin to tell the story of inertia’s trajectory from physics and physiology to figurations of psychic life in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Both preceding and contemporaneous with Freud’s use of the concept of inertia to describe an element of psychic life, work was taking place in other intellectual and geographical contexts to translate this law of physics and physiology to a property of mental life. As a particular illustration of this, I examine a lecture given by British scientist Michael Faraday in 1818, wherein he makes the leap from the inertia of matter to ‘mental inertia’ and is arguably the first recorded thinker to do so in the English language. I then explore the use of the phrase ‘psychic inertia’ in 1900 by Scottish physiologist D.F. Harris and argue that Harris’s work is not only emerging at the same time as Freud’s discoveries, but that he prefigures Freud’s ideas about the relationship between inertia and the death drive in interesting ways. The final part of the paper returns to sketch out Freud’s engagement with the concept in several of his papers.

This paper highlights the important contribution to psychoanalysis made by the psychoanalyst Karin Stephen. Following in the footsteps of other feminist biographers and historians of psychoanalysis, who have worked to bring ‘Freud’s women’ out of the shadows, this article not only focuses on Karin Stephen’s role within the internal political struggles of the British Psychoanalytical Society during the Second World War, but also shows how her psychoanalytic writings can be read in the context of her political activism in the 1930s. Beginning with a biographical account of Stephen’s early life and marriage in October 1914 to Virginia Woolf’s brother, Adrian Stephen, the paper goes on to explore the impact of Karin Stephen’s political activism on her psychoanalytic writing. The article examines Stephen’s arguments, in both her published and her unpublished writings, about the capacity for psychoanalysis to respond to the political crises of the 1930s and 1940s by offering patients freedom from servility to the ‘raging dictator[s]’ within and beyond the inner world of their minds.

In 1985, British psychoanalyst Hanna Segal delivered the paper ‘Silence is the Real Crime’ to the first meeting of the group International Psychoanalysts Against Nuclear Weapons in Hamburg, appealing to her fellow analysts to counteract the denial of the geopolitical realities that characterized the late Cold War by intervening in public debates regarding the threat of nuclear war. A year later she gave a paper in London discussing clinical cases of patients who brought their nuclear anxieties to the couch. This article considers Segal's political and clinical writings on the psychological consequences of the atomic age, situating them in the context in which she was living, writing and practising as an analyst: 1980s Britain in a moment of ‘nuclear anxiety’. I argue that Segal's anti-nuclear writings shed light on what she called the ‘very very tricky’ relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Segal confronted the tension between maintaining clinical neutrality in the consulting room while publicly expressing her political commitments, wrestling with the complex relationships between individuals and the societies in which they live.

Géza Róheim's psychoanalytic, colonial archive is one of the few attempts to document the psychic life of subjects living under settler colonialism. Historians of psychoanalysis have examined Róheim's contributions to the psychoanalytic study of Aboriginal childhood, as well as his exploration of Aboriginal maternal subjectivity. However, Róheim's account of Aboriginal maternal cannibalism needs more attention, as accusations of cannibalism often accompanied cruel colonial policies targeting Aboriginal families. This paper contextualizes Róheim's psychoanalytic insights on the unconscious motives of cannibalism and infanticide amongst Aboriginal mothers and seeks to rethink Róheim's psychoanalytic archive from the point of view of hunger, to explore what it can tell us about the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism, as well as the relationship between psychoanalysis and its colonial past.

Since the publication in 2021 of the first version of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism written in 1934, it is possible to reconstruct the genesis of the book as it was published in 1939, and to compare the two versions. The present article aims to contribute to this effort. It first presents a critical discussion of the reconstructions provided by Grubrich-Simitis and Gindele & Fagard. Then the hypothesis is elaborated that in the Moses project one can detect a shift from a study of the positive traits of the Jewish character (self-esteem, intellectuality) towards a study dominated by the problem of the significance of trauma for the formation of a people and their religion, the theoretical reflections on the interaction between constitutional and accidental factors in the aetiology of pathological formations, and the development of a theory of the murder of Moses as traumatic experience within the framework of a psychoanalytic theory of sexual trauma.

An influential strand within modern translation studies has drawn a portrait of the translator as a deeply ambivalent figure, charged with the challenging task of preserving the foreign of the original work within the new version, and thus as inevitably torn between two languages and cultures. The case of the first English translations of Freud's work, undertaken by Abraham Arden Brill, is used here to demonstrate that a detailed historical and philological analysis of textual practices can help us situate the figure of the ambivalent translator in its proper context, namely within a historical model of translation. Retracing this model and its ramifications also has larger implications for an approach that should allow us to understand the relational, affective and institutional bonds connecting authors, translators and readers in global processes of cultural transmission of the human sciences.

The article offers an intellectual reconstruction of Otto Isakower’s concept of the ‘analyzing instrument’, the vehicle by which the analyst’s mind becomes joined to the patient’s, each in a comparable state of regressed self-observation. This view of technique is shown to have grown out of Isakower’s pre-war research (shaped by the work of Paul Schilder and Paul Federn) on a variety of pre-dormescent hallucination that still bears his name, ‘the Isakower phenomenon’. Primarily, however, it is Isakower’s amateur, apparently peripheral interest in the history and epistemology of science which was, the article argues, central to the evolution of his ideas. In particular, Isakower’s study of the scientific practices of self-observation and self-experimentation used by the nineteenth-century sensory physiologist Johannes Müller is shown to have been a decisive relay point between his earlier clinical research on hypnagogic states and his later reflections on technique. In underscoring the significance of that study, the article suggests that something of the transitional character of Müller’s scientific practices – his location on the threshold between Romantic and modern, positivist styles of investigating the senses – is retained in Isakower’s fascinating model of the analytic situation.