Introduction: Carl E. Schorske as Historian, Writer, and Political and Psychoanalytic Thinker

As Sigmund Freud concisely articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalysis differentiates itself from other psychologies in the vast field of research into the human mind by its central focus on the over-determination of meaning. The person honored in this issue of American Imago has reconceived, expanded, and deepened that essential insight, making us more acutely aware of over-determination as both an active principle in the structuring of the past and an experiential framework for re-engaging critically with the present. Here we offer our tribute to the work of Carl E. Schorske and its continuing importance to the history and theory of psychoanalysis. The participants in this issue have been influenced and inspired directly by his teaching and writing: some of us as his former students at Berkeley or Princeton, all of us as his beneficiaries in the fields of European, Viennese, and Freudian studies.

From the end of the Second World War until the present, the work of Carl E. Schorske—a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a recipient of the American Historical Association's lifetime Distinguished Service and Scholarly Distinction Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow—has remained integral to the study of psychoanalysis and its worlds. His essay on “Politics and Patricide in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams”—published originally in the American Historical Review (1973) and included in his Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980)—remains the seminal historical analysis of Freud's dream book as both a transformative theory of the mind and a radical turning point in culture. In that essay, by contextualizing Freud's relations to his father, to Judaism, to Italy, to science, and to Austrian politics, Schorske suggests not only how to re-comprehend Freud's decisive process of self-analysis and his landmark psychological