Freud and the Émigré

Beschreibung

This collection of essays presents new perspectives on Freud’s role in the lives of Austrian émigrés and exiles in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s. It explores the creative ways in which authors, art historians, psychoanalysts, sociologists and artists accessed Freudian thinking and fashioned their own Freudian languages. Above all, the book seeks to examine the influence of Freud on the scientific and creative writing of émigrés and exiles, as well as on their professional positioning in British society. It probes the collective attempt to fashion an imagined ‘Viennese community’, represented through the promotion of a humanised language and a progressive social engagement. Moving beyond narrow understandings of psychoanalysis either as therapy or intellectual paradigm, the volume explores its broader cultural roles. By exploring psychoanalysis in terms of its specific cultural relationship with Austria, as well as Britain, the chapters show how psychoanalysis also created connections between the two countries in the immediate postwar period.
This book reconsiders standard narratives regarding Austrian émigrés and exiles to Britain by addressing the seminal role of Sigmund Freud and his writings, and the critical part played by his contemporaries, in the construction of a method promoting humanized relations between individual and society and subjectivity and culture. This anthology presents groundbreaking examples of the manners in which well-known personalities including psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, sociologist Marie Jahoda, authors Stefan Zweig and Hilde Spiel, film director Berthold Viertel, architect Ernst Freud, and artist Oskar Kokoschka, achieved a greater impact, and contributed to the broadening of British and global cultures, through constructing a psychologically effective language and activating their émigré networks. They advanced a visionary Viennese tradition through political and social engagements and through promoting humanistic perspectives in their scientific, educational and artistic works.
Offers new perspectives on Freud’s role in the lives of Austrian émigrés and exiles in Britain in the period following World War II Shows how intellectuals and artists engaged with Freudian thinking to create an imagined ‘Viennese community’ Explores deeper questions about emigration and identity, moving beyond understandings of psychoanalysis as therapy or intellectual paradigm

Autor*in

Elana Shapira

Themen in »Freud and the Émigré«

Migration Postwar Mid-twentieth century Austria Britain Artists Intellectuals Social engagement History of pscyhiatry Jewish history Freudian language

Stimmen zu »Freud and the Émigré«

“Although they were written largely before COVID-19 hit, he eleven essays in this collection resonate uncannily with our experience of the pandemic … . the book's chapters range across theory and methodology in history and psychoanalysis, but also in human memory and its repression, modernism, Sigmund and other Freuds of note, art and architecture, language, violence, the persistence of anti-Semitism within and outside of Austria, material culture and dispossession, fantasy and nostalgia, identity, gender and marginalization.” (Elizabeth Ann Danto, Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 23 (3), 2021)
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