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AMERICANIZING PSYCHOANALYSIS

Review products

JohnBurnham (ed.), After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Lawrence J.Friedman, assisted by Anke M.Schreiber, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)

ElizabethLunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2015

MITCHELL G. ASH*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria E-mail: Mitchell.Ash@univie.ac.at

Extract

The general theme that unites the works to be discussed here is the history of psychoanalysis in America over the past hundred years, particularly during the heyday of its public impact from the 1950s through the 1970s. The broad outlines of this story have been well known for some time. Interesting about the volumes discussed here is the step that each book takes in its own way beyond a narrow focus on Freud and his followers or the institutional history of the psychoanalytic profession to examinations of so-called neo-Freudianism and of the entry of psychoanalytic discourse into American middle- and highbrow popular culture. The question whether, how, or to what extent psychoanalysis became “Americanized” in the course of all this is addressed explicitly in the volume by Elizabeth Lunbeck, and implicitly in the other books under review. In the following I will discuss each volume in turn, pointing to linkages among them along the way.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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