Freud's Britain: Family, followers and the dissemination of ideas before and after the Great War

Thesis

Existing histories of psychoanalysis have by and large paid scant attention to the role the Freud family played in Freud’s mental economy, this neglect being most conspicuous with respect to the British branch of the family. Various family members are glimpsed in Freud’s published correspondence and some – notably his nephew John – appear as key characters in the Interpretation of Dreams and other works. This latter observation points to the importance of Freud’s Britain: Freud’s reflections on his own life experiences, with his close-knit family, became indispensable building blocks in his theorising, both for Freud and subsequent psychoanalytic generations. Through a fine-grained study of Emanuel and Philipp Freud (and their families), the variegated influence of these British Freuds on their younger brother is here revealed for the first time. These relationships shaped Freud’s thinking, attitudes, and theorising. They strengthened, if not created, his Anglophilia. Freud’s Britain thus allows for a better contextualised understanding of the actual sibling and familial ties that went into forming the tapestry of psychoanalysis.

Building on the template of this relational base, Freud’s Britain considers key sites and events through which psychoanalysis was disseminated into British culture up to, through, and immediately following the Great War. Thus, the London Psycho-Analytic Society, the Brunswick Square Clinic, and Craiglockhart War Hospital are explored in detail, each with varying and often contested psychoanalytic credentials and sequelae. In this context, the publication and transmission of ideas, particularly through the trade in psychoanalytic books, was crucial and this is here explored in terms of censorship and the politics of translation. Further contextualised here, these processes, while aiding a type of institutionalisation, contributed at the same time to a rather conservative, elitist psychoanalysis, which shifted away from the demotic, and failed to do full justice to the radical message of Freud.

Authors: Willoughby, RT

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dpkg9o1nr
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Freud's family; Brunswick Square Clinic; Craiglockhart War Hospital; Psychoanalysis; Censorship; Publishing; London Psychoanalytic Society; Sigmund Freud; Dissemination of ideas; British Psychoanalytical Society
• Subjects: The early history of British psychoanalysis